The Fintech industry's rapid growth and use of new technologies to meet the rise in demand for online services has brought with it increased levels of cyber crime. Criminals have taken advantage of the benefits digital banks offer to access money, launder illicit money and fund terrorism worldwide. The growth in technology for blockchain and digital payments provides new opportunities for criminals to launder funds at faster speeds and larger scales than they might have been able to previously. According to UK Finance, criminals stole a total of £753.9 million through fraud in the first half of 2021, an increase of 30% compared to H1 2020. With the huge amounts of data that Fintechs process, it's no mean feat to detect potential money laundering activities using manual processes.

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) is heavily used in Big Data and when it comes to the analysis of customers' behaviour. There's also anti-money laundering (AML) AI; it's used to fight financial crime and guard the reputation of app providers. FinTech is about trust, after all. How exactly is it done and how can you benefit? Because cybercrime is serious, there is a special word for it in the financial world.

HSBC Holdings has partnered with Silicon Valley-based artificial intelligence startup Ayasdi to automate some of its compliance processes in a bid to become more efficient. The banking group is implementing the company's AI technology to automate anti money-laundering investigations that have traditionally been conducted by thousands of humans, the bank's Chief Operating Officer Andy Maguire said in an interview last week. The vast majority of anti money-laundering investigations at banks do not find suspicious activity, resulting in a waste of resources, according to the startup. In a pilot of Ayasdi's technology, HSBC saw the number of investigations drop by 20% without reducing the number of cases referred for more scrutiny, according to the startup. "It's a win-win," Maguire said.