According to recent research from KPMG, spending in North America to combat money-laundering activities has continued to rise at an average rate of 53 percent for banking institutions and is predicted to keep increasing. As financial services firms in particular attempt to keep up with growing regulatory requirements related to uncovering terrorist financing and money laundering, AML divisions are often tasked with time- and resource-intensive monitoring, analysis, and reporting. Areas of significant cost include documenting the impact that detection model tuning has on identifying suspicious activity and writing Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) Narratives.

Quill for AML automates many of the manual processes related to regulatory reporting and compliance documentation by generating natural language reports that are consistent and traceable back to the system of record. The solution helps AML departments:

• Meet regulatory requirements - Quill for AML equips AML compliance teams with immediate access to comprehensive and accurate narrative reports, including automated SAR Narratives, and reduces the need for additional resources.
• Ensure consistency and increase scale of reporting - Quill for AML standardizes reporting to satisfy regulatory bodies' desire for consistency while also writing reports in seconds so they are filed on time, every time.
• Improve transparency - Quill for AML enables AML analytics teams to optimize detection models without spending days reporting on the recommended changes. Quill can increase transparency into model changes and report in plain language the benefits of parameter changes.

"AML teams are caught between a rock and a hard place, with escalating regulatory expectations on one side, and constrained resources on the other. Even if they have budget to hire, it's increasingly difficult to find good AML analysts to work mounting alerts," said Julie Conroy, research director for Aite Group's Retail Banking practice. "Quill for AML can help to alleviate some of the burden by automating the generation of consistent and accurate SAR narratives at scale."

"AML teams also struggle with mounting superfluous and unproductive alerts from their analytics and case management systems. Increasing unproductive alerts -- or false positives -- mean higher compliance costs, as analysts need to spend time interpreting the context of the alerts and deeming if they are indeed suspicious, or just unusual," said Stuart Frankel, CEO of Narrative Science. "Organizations that wish to remain competitive and compliant should look to Quill for AML to augment reporting processes so analysts' time is freed up to add value in other ways."