Banks can now tap IBM Watson to fight financial crime

Who will be the first to implement the new suite of Watson services?

From the newly formed Watson Financial Services division, IBM has released the first suite of services covering regulatory requirements, financial crime insights, and financial risk modelling.

These cognitive tools have been made possible following IBM’s 2016 acquisition of global consulting operation, Promontory Financial Group. Promontory was originally working to provide support to banks dealing with the growing and tightening regulation and risk management within the financial services.

It was the knowledge and expertise accessed in this acquisition that brought life to the new financial services-focussed Watson services, with regulation and risk accounting for two thirds of the suite, and a financial crime tool completing the set. The new tools can be accessed via the IBM Cloud.

Watson’s ability to now provide assistance with regulation and risk may draw the attention of organisations concerned by the impending GDPR, and prompt the question of whether the IBM technology could be configured to work in this space.

IBM has also deployed Watson to the Telecoms space after Bluewolf tapped the technology of Einstein and Watson. This involved the combination of IBM Watson APIs with Vlocity and Salesforce Einstein.

Bridget van Kralingen, SVP of IBM Industry Platforms said: “Two generations ago, IBM brought the first computers to the financial services sector, allowing banks and other institutions to foster greater trust in the market by operating more efficiently and accurately”.

“To foster trust today, financial institutions must analyze an industry’s worth of information to monitor risk and compliance. No individual – or team of them – can adequately do this alone, and so once again, IBM is bringing a new type of computing – cognitive computing – to help these professionals operate more effectively.”