Dimensions: Financial Crime IT Pressures and Priorities 2024
There has been a dramatic shift from standing still to moving forward with change initiatives.
Abstract
Fighting financial crime has jumped to the top of Risk priorities in 2024, with a majority of Risk executives citing it as one of their top three concerns. This is supporting steady growth in technology spending for financial crime. Based on results from the Celent Dimensions 2024 survey, Celent does a deep dive into financial crime strategies at financial institutions globally. Key findings include:
- Financial institutions have been quick to see the potential of generative AI for anti-financial crime. More than two-thirds of FIs globally indicated they are testing GenAI use cases for AFC. In terms of regions, Asia Pacific is the most active in exploring use cases—including India where all survey respondents are working on AFC use cases for GenAI.
- Financial institutions are steadily moving more of their anti-financial crime systems to the cloud. As financial services and payments become more digital and with the availability of cloud-based technology with advanced features, FIs are both becoming more comfortable with deploying sensitive AFC systems on the cloud and have more reasons to do so.
- Financial institutions are trending away from convergence of fraud and AML systems. While a majority of financial institutions say there is some degree of cooperation between their AML and fraud operations, the trend is down from pandemic highs.
Technology priorities to support financial crime operations in the retail banking, corporate banking, capital markets and wealth management sectors are represented in the survey, including all tier sizes of these financial services sectors and regional views for North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. The report examines technology trends including:
- Financial crime technology budget growth in 2024 by function: AML transaction monitoring, KYC, sanctions and fraud.
- Impact areas within financial crime for AI/machine learning.
- Priority financial crime use cases for generative AI.
- Cloud adoption rates for financial crime systems.
- Focus on financial crime compliance: maturity levels of AML processes and systems as reported by participating institutions.
The Celent Dimensions suite of reports for tracking financial institution IT priorities and spending includes drivers for IT investment as well as dollar spending forecasts. Our survey design allows us to create common questions that address all the areas that Celent covers, giving us the unique ability to compare results among different lines of business.