Reported by Dylan Tokar

Alphabet’s cloud business on Wednesday announced the launch of a new AI-driven anti-money-laundering product. Like many other tools already on the market, the company’s technology uses machine learning to help clients in the financial sector comply with regulations that require them to screen for and report potentially suspicious activity.

Where Google Cloud aims to set itself apart is by doing away with the rules-based programming that is typically an integral part of setting up and maintaining an anti-money-laundering surveillance program—a design choice that goes against the prevailing approach to such tools and could be subject to skepticism from some quarters of the industry.

The product, an application programming interface dubbed Anti Money Laundering AI, already has some notable users, including London-based HSBC, Brazil’s Banco Bradescoand Lunar, a Denmark-based digital bank.

Google Cloud’s decision to do away with rules-based inputs to guide what its surveillance tool should be looking for is a bet on AI’s power to solve a problem that has dogged the financial sector for years. 

With Google Cloud’s product, users won’t be able to input rules, but they will be able to customize the tool using their own risk indicators or typologies, executives said.

Jennifer Shasky Calvery, the group head of financial crime risk and compliance at HSBC and the former top U.S. anti-money-laundering official, said the technology developed by Google Cloud represented a “fundamental paradigm shift in how we detect unusual activity in our customers and their accounts.”

Read full report: https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-cloud-launches-anti-money-laundering-tool-for-banks-betting-on-the-power-of-ai-2512ccce