AI MAY BE YOUR ONLY OPPORTUNITY TO IDENTIFY DOMESTIC TERRORISM FINANCING AT YOUR BANK

Countering the financing of terrorism is an extremely difficult task for compliance officers; terrorist acts can often be accomplished on a shoestring budget, and the amount of funding generally necessary to accomplish the desired goals is even smaller when we are talking about domestic terrorism. Most bank compliance officers cannot tie together the unrelated financial transactions that domestic terrorists assemble to pull of an isolated terrorist act, because the players often have no criminal history, and no record of prior acts, unlike international actors, who usually belong to a designated organization, or are otherwise identifiable.

Enter Artificial Intelligence as a value added to enhanced due diligence platforms, and the situation changes, in favor of the compliance officers conducting the investigation. AI returns results on totally unrelated individuals, seemingly unconnected to your target, but nevertheless potentially linked. This allows those searching to build a matrix of individuals, and disconnected events, that provides a picture of possible domestic terrorism ring. Legacy systems never did that, and those conventional programs are the reason domestic terrorist organizations were seldom identified in advance of terrorist acts.

Therefore, if you are a compliance officer in an area of Middle America where conditions, the political climate, and geography all favor the rise of domestic terrorist organizations, you can reduce the risks that you are unwittingly banking such groups, by utilizing the ability of AI-powered platforms to ferret out the obscure red flags which their actions generate, either in unrelated financial transactions, or disparate prior acts which constitute their other terrorist-related overt acts; Happy hunting.