Fivecast’s AI insights streamline financial crime investigations

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Fivecast empowers financial investigation teams to swiftly assess customer risk across masses of online information. As a global provider of open-source intelligence (OSINT) software, Fivecast’s AI and machine learning capabilities have demonstrated a nearly four-fold increase in efficiency compared with conventional manual approaches to KYC/EDD and AML investigations, delivering faster results, boosting productivity, and reducing compliance costs for financial institutions worldwide.
 
The global regulatory landscape is rapidly changing, demanding new data sources to meet evolving due diligence requirements for AML compliance. This is highlighted in the European Union’s expanded guidance and definitions pursuant to EU AMLD6, along with unprecedented consent orders from the US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Australian Government’s AUSTRAC guidance for AML/CTF obligations.
 
The Fivecast platform delivers relevant and actionable information from a vast range of online data sources, enabling broad digital footprint discovery combined with in-depth, AI-driven multimedia data analysis. Current sources and methods used for financial intelligence investigations, by contrast, are missing critical, risk-based information about customers, leading financial institutions to grossly underestimate their risk exposure.
 
Fivecast enables financial investigation units to efficiently and accurately assess a customer’s risk profile to rapidly identify predicate crimes and customer risk exposure and adopt a genuine risk-based approach to compliance while minimising compliance costs.
 
The increase in judgments for AML non-compliance and the changing regulatory landscape are pushing financial institutions to explore new innovative technologies to address these many challenges. In 2024, global penalties related to financial crime imposed by US regulators surpassed $4.3 billion. Notably, TD Bank, the sixth-largest bank in North America, incurred $3 billion in fines for AML non-compliance, particularly for gaps in their due diligence programmes.
 
Duane Rivett, Fivecast Co-founder and VP of Strategic Growth, said: “The vastly superior speed and accuracy of our digital intelligence platform streamlines slow, labour-intensive processes in a highly sensitive area for financial institutions. Some banks employ thousands of analysts to perform enhanced due diligence and investigate money laundering or terrorism financing. Just as national security agencies use our products to analyse extremist or terrorist networks online, banks are doing the same with a slightly different focus.”