Financial Crime Investigations & Economic Sanctions Analytics

Economic sanctions analyses, typically coupled with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing, among other areas comprising financial crime analytics, require regulatory and financial services expertise, technology “tools,” and real-world experience. FTI Consulting has intellectual property dedicated specifically to financial crime analytics, including algorithms and detection scenarios, lists and reference data sets, Augmented Investigations™ capabilities, and workflow tools review platforms with real-time project management information. Law firms and corporations rely on our firm as a trusted, independent partner because our financial crime capabilities have been tested and proven on countless, sometimes headline-grabbing, matters.

How We Help

Each matter on which a client engages us is assigned an integrated project team — top practitioners who have the depth and breadth of expertise to grasp the nuances of your challenges. We combine industry and regulatory experts with skilled data and analytics professionals to safeguard investigations progress along an optimal strategic path, fully enabled by technology. Like most of our clients’ operational and compliance and legal challenges, our industry and regulatory expertise is global, and we deliver this as a unified capability built to meet an individual client’s requirements.

While companies and law firms are now challenged by volumes and varieties of data that until recently have been unfeasible to investigate, new “augmented” analytical methods transform how investigations are now done. Today, machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and other AI and network analysis methods connect and cluster data, enabling holistic review of massive data sets that vary from numeric to text and even image in form.

Our technology expertise is hands-on and battle-tested, qualifying our firm to handle any data type. Whether you need to look at SWIFT or other payment messages, core banking transactions, IP address log files, chat and email, plain-old documents, or a combination of these and other sources, we know what tools are required to comprehensively survey organizational data and to extract and manage evidence in a defensible, forensically sound manner.

At whatever stage you need support, we have the expertise to assist:

• Preventative/proactive measures for organizations. We help companies across multiple industries proactively manage risk and safeguard compliance using data-and-analytics-driven systems and controls. Our experience enables scenarios development, rules tuning, along with ongoing algorithm validation and data enrichment for screening and monitoring systems. Interactive control performance dashboards provide management information and understanding to help identify problematic areas as they emerge. We continuously adapt our proprietary detection scenarios and screening/matching technology to the specifics of our clients’ ever-evolving areas of risk. Clients engage us because of our well-curated, established models, algorithms and processes, and our experience in preventing compliance failings across the globe and industry segments.
• During an event. Regulatory breaches, fraud, and wider corporate malfeasance require sophisticated investigative resources to quantify and respond to these issues. Our firm is often at the forefront of uncovering industry thematic challenges. We work with external legal counsel or directly with organizations, leveraging our firm’s Augmented Investigations™ capability set that expedites and adds new insight to a variety of investigative scenarios. Alongside core data analytics, it harnesses network analysis, transaction clustering, customer segmentation and other project-tested sophisticated ML and NLP technologies and techniques. Patterns, clusters, outliers and progress are visualized to present results, allowing the combination of subject-matter-expert and machine-driven issue exploration. Interactive dashboards facilitate understanding and build credibility, enabling users to develop an intuitive sense of the activity represented by the data.
• Post-investigation. We support our clients beyond the investigation, from litigation support to post-matter compliance programs that reduce risk. This includes participating actively in ongoing regulatory presentations and discussions that reap the full benefits of our analytical and investigative work. Our analytics experts can explain how our Augmented Investigations™ capabilities were applied, which is often an area of scrutiny by both courts and regulators. Our team acts as independent examiners or monitors to provide ongoing assurance around agreed remediations. Having served in this capacity in many and often large matters, our teams have a playbook and technology set to productively move our clients forward in satisfying regulators. We apply sophisticated data analytics at this stage, validating your models, and performing testing and evaluations to determine if your systems and processes are in place. If issues arise over time and a regulator is requiring information or response, we review your historic compliance, help you adjust and remediate as needed, and help you report back to the regulator.