Citi Rolls Out AI-Powered Risk Analytics Scoring Engine

Citi announced on Monday (April 29) the launch of NextGen, its artificial intelligence-powered risk analytics scoring engine.

In a press release, Citi said it teamed up with EY and SAS to create the scoring engine, which aims to streamline the time it takes to review high volumes of trade transactions while also ensuring regulatory compliance. By combining EY’s business, risk and technology consulting expertise in the financial services sector with SAS’ advanced analytics platform, Citi said it can offer another service to further digitize the trade compliance process. This will help the bank eliminate time-consuming manual processes and provide a better view of risk activities and insights.

“By leveraging innovation, we continue our strategic journey to drive digitization throughout our worldwide operations,” John Ahearn, global head of trade for Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, said in the press release. “We process nine million transactions annually, and the NextGen project will help us optimize our processes from the back office to the front by expanding the use of digitization, automation and advanced analytics.”

The NextGen Platform will provide an in-depth analysis of global trade transactions, advanced analytics and natural language processing, along with process automation that combines analytic results and trade-related bank policies. The goal is to help the bank focus on trade activities that need to be examined as part of its escalation process.

“Banks face almost overwhelming scale and complexity in the trade finance sector and in compliance activities,” said Stu Bradley, vice president of fraud and security intelligence at SAS. “SAS’ sophisticated analytics platform will help Citi drive more effective and efficient monitoring of trade transactions. The resulting performance and enhanced risk insights should lead to a better risk posture, improved response times for monitoring and reduced operational costs.”

NextGen is just the latest move on the part of Citi’s global trade business to digitize platforms and processes, utilizing the latest innovations in the marketplace. According to Citi, the unit digitizes more than 25 million trade-related pages each year with optical character recognition. It will expand its offering by using AI to automate more manual processes.

“Trade compliance is a key focus for global regulators, and this drives increasing expectations about the scope and sophistication of a bank’s controls,” said Jake Jacobson, EY U.S. managed services CIO, in the press release. “Many banks still rely on manual, paper-based processes, driving up operational costs and impacting the customer experience. Innovative technology helps change the game entirely.”