Why AI alone isn’t the solution to financial crime
Financial crime remains one of the toughest and costliest challenges facing global banks. According to UN estimates, criminals launder between $800 billion and $2 trillion annually, which is almost equivalent to the GDP of a country like Italy or Canada.
To make matters worse, financial institutions are spending $206 billion per year on financial crime compliance, but only detecting a measly 1-2% of illicit activity.
Why such poor returns on massive investment? The root cause isn’t just sophisticated criminals. It’s also fragmented, inconsistent data that prevents compliance teams from seeing what’s right in front of them.
The compliance cost of fragmented data
Financial institutions often rely on dozens of disconnected systems to manage customer, account, transaction, and counterparty records. This leaves compliance teams spending more time reconciling information than investigating risk.
When data is fragmented across multiple sources, false positives increase, and real threats slip through, leading to inaccurate reporting, regulatory risks, and disgruntled customers.
While this issue remains largely unresolved, banks are already under pressure to embrace the next wave of AI innovation.
Agentic AI raises the stakes
Banks are all too aware of the transformative potential of agentic AI. Autonomous AI agents can plan, reason, and take action across entire KYC (Know Your Customer), AML (Anti-Money Laundering), and fraud investigation workflows.
Unlike traditional or even generative AI, agentic AI can orchestrate end-to-end processes, freeing human analysts to focus only on complex exceptions.
This all sounds wonderful, in theory. Who wouldn’t want a squad of AI agents able to independently execute end-to-end fraud investigations and deliver up to 2,000% productivity gains?
Yet this upside depends entirely on the integrity of the underlying data. If fragmented, outdated, or duplicated records flow into AI systems, then every decision and action becomes suspect. Instead of accelerating compliance, AI may simply accelerate mistakes.
Without unifying fragmented data to create a trusted foundation, agentic AI will not deliver its promise. Instead, it risks compounding errors at scale. And in the world of financial services, there is no margin for error.
Building a trusted foundation
Unifying scattered data means more than just integrating sources into a warehouse or data lake. It requires continuously consolidating, cleansing, and enriching records across domains such as customers, accounts, products, and counterparties, then linking them through their relationships and interactions.
With this trusted foundation in place, financial institutions can:
- Reduce false positives with a single, accurate record for each customer or counterparty
- Accelerate investigations with complete, real-time customer profiles
- Strengthen compliance with transparent audit trails that show where data comes from and how it’s been handled
- Enhance customer experience through smoother onboarding and consistent interactions
Put simply, unifying fragmented data transforms compliance from a cost center into a strategic differentiator.
From defensive compliance to proactive risk management
A trusted data foundation doesn’t just solve regulatory pain points. It empowers institutions to shift from reactive compliance to proactive risk management. For example:
- Real-time customer profiles enable continuous monitoring instead of periodic reviews
- Enriched transaction histories make it easier to identify emerging fraud patterns
- Unified views of corporate hierarchies support sharper counterparty risk assessments
By operationalizing trusted data across KYC, AML, and fraud use cases, banks can enhance resilience, reduce costs, and deliver better experiences, all while staying ahead of regulators.
How Reltio empowers banks to unify their data
At Reltio, we see this every day: financial institutions cannot fully leverage AI—or effectively fight financial crime—without solving the data foundation problem.
Reltio Data Cloud provides the platform to unify fragmented data into a trusted, real-time foundation. It continuously consolidates and enriches data from across silos, creating context-rich 360° profiles of customers, accounts, and related parties. These profiles capture relationships and interactions that are critical for accurate risk decisions.
Just as importantly, Reltio can connect this trusted data in milliseconds to any system, application, or AI agent, assuring that both human compliance officers and digital agents are working from the same, reliable information. With built-in governance, lineage, and consent management, institutions can also maintain compliance while accelerating innovation.
Real-world example: Fulton Bank
Fulton Bank faced the same data fragmentation challenges that plague many financial institutions, with customer information scattered across over 15 sources, including legacy systems from mergers and acquisitions. Inconsistent views and data quality issues made it harder to detect risks and serve customers effectively.
By using Reltio to bring all their data together, the bank achieved a 360-degree customer view with real-time entity resolution, enabling them to improve data quality, reduce operational inefficiencies, and build the trusted data foundation needed to support AI initiatives.
The path forward
The fight against financial crime is ultimately a fight against fragmented data. Agentic AI offers breakthrough potential for compliance efficiency and effectiveness, but only when it operates on a trusted foundation.
For financial institutions, the path forward is clear: unify fragmented data, govern it rigorously, and make it available in real time. Do this, and agentic AI can become a powerful ally in reducing risk, meeting regulatory obligations, and delivering seamless customer experiences.
With Reltio Data Cloud, banks can build that trusted foundation, turning compliance into a strategic advantage.
Leading banks and Fortune 500 companies trust Reltio to unify and activate their data. Explore Reltio’s solutions for the financial services industry, or get your copy of the Agentic AI playbook.
