Arachnys
Robotic Process Automation to Maximize Operational Excellence

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that 2 percent-5 percent of global GDP is lost to money laundering per year, this equates to US $800 billion to US $2 trillion per annum. In the fight against the alarming rates of financial crimes and fraud, chief risk officers (CROs) have to also contend with the ever-changing complex compliance regulations stipulated by the numerous global regulators. The vital need of the hour, however, is to resolve and rebuild a broken and fragmented on-boarding process to accelerate revenue into the institution while staying compliant. Against this backdrop, Arachnys is architecting a process transformation that enhances efficiency and operational consistency right from the initial request to become a customer to ongoing and periodic monitoring. “Arachnys is a cloud-based machine learning platform that automates and integrates cumbersome processes that exist today across know your customer, onboarding, enhanced due diligence, and other anti-money laundering investigation processes,” explains Edward Sander, the President of Arachnys.

In their quest to quickly onboard customers while ensuring regulatory compliance, banks have to first take into account the global business scenario and ensure that they conduct investigations consistently across the entire bank every time, and at the same time, ensuring that local jurisdiction regulations and requirements are supported and adhered to. The second aspect is to hasten the investigation process where the prime hurdle proves to be in not having access to the right information at the right time to make a risk determination. Arachnys democratizes access to information through its robotic process automation (RPA). “We have the world’s largest cloud-based open source database with over 23,000 information sources within our curated library that covers more than 200 jurisdictions and is available in over 80 languages,” states Sander.

The robots map out the entire information library on a daily basis and aggregate the changes in the information, whereby banks can get up-to-date information.

“Our RPA technology and robots are partners and little armies that work on behalf of every single analyst to reduce their manual work and focus on high-value investigative work that results in faster case closures,” extols Sander.

As the tertiary value-add, the Arachnys solution addresses the predicament faced by the banks in the loss of intellectual property when their best investigators leave the company in search of greener pastures. The Arachnys solution memorizes and memorializes how investigators use information and risk determinations and catalogs that within the system. “This becomes a reference for new investigators carrying out investigations in different parts of the world, accelerating the process,” says Sander.

The platform’s machine learning capabilities continually enhances its ability to validate whether particular information constitutes false positive information (seemingly valuable at first but determined not to be) or a true quality indicator of risk. “Over time, our machine learns how to use and present different pieces of information to produce quality suspicious activity reports (SARs) that a bank needs to submit to the regulator efficiently and quickly,” says Sander. In an implementation highlight, a top U.S.- based global bank was able to increase their throughput by 25 percent while reducing rework by a substantial 75 percent because of the RPA and machine learning capabilities within the Arachnys cloud platform.

Arachnys’ future investments are in natural language processing and semantic interpretation capabilities to garner meaningful insights from unstructured data through deep web searches, strengthening their compliance and risk investigation services.

According to Sander, there is a religious war happening in compliance. With the currently available analytic platforms in the market, banks in their fight against financial crime get reports only after the damage has happened or is happening. “The Arachnys solution, on the other hand, gets smarter about entities, companies, and individuals and helps the financial community to truly stop a financial crime before it begins,” concludes Sander.