Improving Financial Investigations: Essential Strategies for Success

How Technology Improves Financial Investigation Outcomes

Financial crime continues to generate significant wealth for organized crime while continuing to cost hundreds of billions of dollars to manage for the regulated sector. If financial institutions (FIs) don’t modernize their investigative processes, they risk falling behind. Criminals exploit vulnerabilities faster than the regulated sector can respond. Alert volumes continue to escalate, and with growing operational complexity, costly compliance demands, and operational inefficiencies and bottlenecks, traditional methods are no match for today’s challenges. FIs must adapt quickly or face greater financial losses, reputational harm, and regulatory penalties.

Each alert requires review, but with finite resources, backlogs become a constant challenge for many organizations. A delayed response increases exposure to ongoing criminal activity, risking significant financial and reputational damage. Manual processes hinder investigators’ efforts. Instead of conducting investigations, they spend the majority (sometimes up to 80%) of their time on administrative tasks like collecting data, copying records, and compiling reports. These repetitive activities drain productivity and prevent skilled investigators from focusing on where their skills will have the greatest impact, in identifying, mitigating, and reporting suspicious and criminal activity. Many FIs believe that spending money on labor is the answer, this is why 70% of labor costs are spent on investigators. However, throwing more money and people at the problem increases strain on the institution and is not scalable long term.

The Challenges of Investigating Money Laundering

Fraud schemes today are complex, they involve elaborate networks, multiple jurisdictions, and hidden connections. Many successful frauds often involve the victim being tricked into sending money to the criminal, with criminal influence occurring through a channel that is not monitored by the FI – commonly known as Authorized or Authorized Push Payment (APP) fraud. Manual methods struggle to handle the volume and intricacy of data required to investigate these cases effectively.

Money laundering occurs as a result of a successful fraud or other financially motivated crimes such as drug dealing, human trafficking, or wildlife crime. Criminals are resorting to increasingly covert ways to hide and move their illicit wealth, utilizing various products and services offered by financial service organizations but also through a network of enablers and facilitators such as mule networks and corporate entities. The complexities of today’s criminal networks make money laundering investigations a costly and time-consuming process for the regulated sector. Fully manual investigations and processes risk missing critical information which would result in a different outcome decision.

Without advanced analytics, many crimes remain undetected, unresolved, or result in the wrong decision being made, which can adversely affect the victim or the regulated sector organization. The combination of growing alert volumes, complex criminal networks and evolving threats, and manual processes results in inefficiencies that threaten every institution’s ability to respond effectively to fraud and financial crimes. Such a strain on resources leads to investigator burnout, increased operational costs, and diminished public trust.

Legacy Technology

Traditional methods rely heavily on manual processes and siloed systems & data, which are ill-suited to today’s fast-paced financial crime environment. The inability to adapt quickly to investigate evolving threats results in missed opportunities to prevent fraud or money laundering, as slow processing of alerts leaves criminals with more time to exploit vulnerabilities. High turnover in investigation teams, due to overwhelming workloads or unproductive work, further weakens operational continuity. Institutions that cling to outdated and reactive approaches find themselves unable to make fast and accurate decisions, leaving them one step behind the criminals.

Empowering Investigators

There is a better way. Technology is redefining how FIs investigate and combat fraud and financial crime, ensuring enhanced compliance and reduced risk. By automating repetitive tasks, enhancing insights, and enabling faster decision-making, a modern case management platform empowers teams to work smarter, not harder. Automation reduces the burden of routine tasks, such as gathering data, identifying patterns, and preparing initial case documentation.  AI quickly analyzes complex data, displaying it clearly and accurately, enabling investigators to focus on analyzing intelligence and making informed decisions. AI even suggests the evidential value of identified intelligence and will provide recommended next steps in the investigation. These steps help guide the investigators, whatever their experience, toward delivering consistent, thorough, and well documented decisions. Technology can reduce time and resources spent on investigations by upwards of 80% – allowing investigators to spend more time using their skills to investigate high risk activity and less time administrating investigation processes. This not only leads to better staff retention, but increased accuracy and therefore decreased risk to FIs and their customers. 

Enhancing Investigations

Sophisticated analytics solutions further propel and enhance investigation efficiency. Uncovering hidden connections and risk in vast datasets for a more holistic view of the entities and actions. These insights allow investigators to detect fraud or organized crime networks that would otherwise remain concealed, accelerating the resolution of complex cases. In addition to speeding up investigations, AI-driven tools streamline regulatory compliance. SAR narratives, which often require significant time and effort to prepare, can be generated automatically. This ensures consistency, regulatory alignment, and a significant reduction in the time needed for report preparation (upwards of 70% for some.) The ability to integrate these systems quickly while augmenting existing workflows ensures institutions can adopt new technologies without significant disruptions. This enables FIs to maintain a modern compliance and investigation program which can quickly adapt with the changing landscape of fraud and financial crime.

A Look Toward the Future

FIs are facing an increasingly globalized financial crime and compliance environment. Fraud schemes are quickly crossing borders, laundered funds are transitioning between organizations and jurisdictions with ease, and organized crimes are steadily getting more coordinated. Addressing these crimes requires not only coordination across organizations and jurisdictions, but also the strengthening of regulatory frameworks and guidance. Emerging threats, such as cryptocurrency fraud and synthetic identity theft, add complexity to the fight against financial crime, and the continued evolution of organized criminal gangs will make it increasingly more difficult to detect money laundering without ongoing adaptation. Additionally, tight budgets and a shortage of skilled professionals and resourcing pressures will continue to amplify the difficulty of maintaining effective investigative programs. Public scrutiny further heightens the stakes, as any failure to address fraud and financial crime can damage an institution’s reputation in the marketplace. Without a technology-driven transformation, firms risk falling further behind, allowing criminals to act with impunity and increasing financial and reputational risks.

Institutions that embrace advanced technology are seeing dramatic improvements across multiple fronts. Faster investigations become the norm as automation eliminates delays caused by manual tasks, clearing backlogs and improving response times. Investigators become more productive, through the gathering of the right information at the right time, ensuring that they can focus on high-value tasks rather than administrative work. Moreover, compliance improves through the automation of investigation workflows and SAR filings, which ensures consistent, regulator-compliant investigations and reports while significantly reducing labor costs. These benefits don’t just streamline operations—they also enable scalability. As alert volumes grow, AI-powered tools adapt to handle increased workloads without requiring proportional staffing increases. Finally, by responding more effectively to threats, institutions build stronger defenses that not only catch criminals faster and protect customers but also make it a less desirable environment for the criminals to operate.

NICE Actimize AI-Powered Solutions

NICE Actimize is a leader in automating, accelerating, and enriching financial crime investigations for global institutions of all sizes. Our AI-powered case platform delivers unparalleled efficiency and precision: InvestigateAI simplifies workflows and reduces investigation times by half, empowering investigators to prioritize high-value cases. NarrateAI automates SAR filings, cutting completion times by upwards of 70% while maintaining regulatory compliance and accuracy.      

In addition, our case management platform integrates comprehensive data ingestion and profile enrichment, dynamic workflow automation, and alert integration from across all fraud, financial crime and compliance systems for a single, centralized view. NICE Actimize enables institutions to handle growing workloads, improve compliance, and deliver stronger outcomes with reduced resources and operational costs.

Financial crime continues to grow in scale and complexity, and institutions must adapt to remain effective. Technology isn’t just a nice to have—it’s a strategic advantage that allows institutions to act faster, smarter, and with greater precision. Drastically improving every FIs day to day program and accelerating the fight against financial crime, NICE Actimize redefines what’s possible in fighting financial crime, offering firms the efficiency and intelligence needed to stay ahead.

Ready to transform your investigations? Request a demo today and see the power of technology in action.