Using machine translation to halt financial fraud in its tracks

Organizations today are confronted with an ever-evolving and -expanding set of laws and standards that they are required to understand, implement and comply with.

 

With the explosions in the variety and volume of multilingual content and data, banks and financial institutions governed by strict regulations are already facing a critical challenge to monitor customer and employee communication that take place across borders and languages to prevent, detect and investigate fraud, waste and abuse.

 

In today’s complex regulatory landscape, with increased government scrutiny, tighter regulations and new standards coming into effect, how can linguistic AI technology support the financial sector to future proof its compliance practices?

The scale and scope of information and communication via email, chat, intranet, forums, text notes, and the many documents that flow through an organization are overwhelming in today’s content-intensive landscape.

 

McKinsey estimates that about a fifth of a knowledge worker's week is dedicated to writing emails, searching for information, and collaborating internally. Meanwhile, Statista reports that employees spend as much as 2.5 hours daily, both within and after working hours, tackling work emails.

 

Compliance monitoring ensures organizations enforce the policies and procedures in these day-to-day operations and functions.  This involves surveillance, review, and analysis of organizational performance and risk indicators, enabling them to spot non-compliance and take immediate action. Violating data security or compliance issues risk breaking client trust, dramatically damaging their reputation in the industry and not to mention hefty fines.

 

In fact, bank AML fines in 2022 totalled over $2 billion in civil monetary penalties globally. In one of the largest fines of 2022, a European bank was found to have insufficient transaction monitoring of high-risk customers and inadequate enhanced due diligence (EDD) measures.

 

Buried and lurking in every corner of foreign language communication could be key information on non-compliant activities. With AI-powered machine translation, multilingual content becomes less a cause for concern and instead a vast opportunity of finding the insight hidden within it thanks to large-scale, instant translation capabilities.

AI is revolutionizing the modern workplace. Secure, enterprise-grade neural machine translation (NMT) enables efficient and accurate translation of multilingual content. A secure NMT such as Language Weaver, can be used to translate emails, documents, websites, spreadsheets, presentations and other assets directly from one language to another. It can quickly and accurately translate this content into a language understood by investigators – enabling them to understand and analyze the content for potential fraud, waste and abuse.

The ability to instantly translate multilingual content enables teams to perform analysis and investigation faster, allowing them to respond quickly to any potential violations. With the help of secure NMT, teams can work more efficiently, resulting in a faster and more effective response.

 

Taking advantage of the latest AI advances, machine translation is dramatically accelerating translation workflows by automating post-editing. Language Weaver is removing the acute bottleneck in localization workflows through automatic post-editing by blending the capabilities of neural machine translation (NMT), quality estimation (QE) and large language model (LLM) into one secure seamless functionality.

Secure NMT can be easily integrated with eDiscovery platforms like Relativity to automatically translate multilingual content within the platform. It can also be integrated with cybersecurity platforms such as Proofpoint and digital forensic tools like NUIX to translate multilingual content found during digital forensic investigations.

Machine translation does what humans can’t, and that’s translate thousands of words per minute to find key information that will perhaps avoid a violation. What’s more, the cost of a proprietary secure solution pales into insignificance when compared to the financial and reputational cost of non-compliance.

The machine translation solution chosen must ensure secure and encrypted communication between the translation engine, the user interface, and the data store. This is essential to protect sensitive and confidential data from unauthorized access. In most cases, on-premises MT platform deployments are required.

 

As with any international operations, language can be a difficult barrier to overcome. When stakes are high with huge fines and reputation on the line, secure machine translation is an important component of any compliance monitoring toolkit to stamp out fraud, waste, and abuse for banks and financial institutions.

 

Explore AI-powered machine translation for the financial sector with Language Weaver.