Napier AI, a RegTech providing financial crime compliance software to institutions worldwide, has launched its Insights AI feature within its Transaction Monitoring solution, following rigorous testing through the FCA’s Supercharged Sandbox programme.
The Insights AI feature addresses a long-standing challenge faced by financial crime compliance teams — investigation inefficiency. Analysts have historically been required to manually piece together contextual information to understand why certain activity appears suspicious.
Insights AI tackles this by surfacing behavioural analytics and natural language explanations directly within transaction monitoring tasks, highlighting patterns and emerging risks during the investigation process, cutting down on manual analysis and reducing the need for analysts to switch between systems.
The development of Insights AI is rooted in work carried out under ‘Project Theseus’, which Napier AI presented at the FCA Supercharged Sandbox Showcase. Project Theseus involved two distinct tests — pattern mining and fluid dynamics — both of which employed novel frequency-based AI algorithms applied to large-scale synthetic financial datasets.
These approaches proved capable of detecting money-laundering typologies more effectively than conventional rules-based systems, while demanding considerably less compute power. The resulting models are now embedded within the Napier AI Continuum platform, continuously tuned by the company’s data science team, and form the foundation of the newly launched Insights AI feature.
Napier AI serves over 100 financial institutions globally, offering AML and financial crime compliance software to banks, payments firms, and wealth and asset management companies. Its Continuum platform is designed to shift compliance from a regulatory burden into a genuine competitive advantage.
Prior to this announcement, Napier AI collaborated with the FCA, The Alan Turing Institute, and Plenitude on an initiative to develop fully synthetic datasets built on anonymised real transactions and layered typologies. These datasets allow financial institutions to train and test their compliance strategies against realistic money-laundering scenarios.
As part of this work, chief data scientist Dr Janet Bastiman was appointed to the FCA’s Synthetic Data Expert Group, contributing industry expertise on the safe use and governance of synthetic data.
Napier AI chief data scientist Dr Janet Bastiman said, “Participating in the FCA Supercharged Sandbox allowed us to design and run new approaches to testing AI models for anti money-laundering. One of the biggest historical challenges in tackling complex money laundering typologies is the disconnected nature of the data required for pattern analysis along the complete lifecycle of a customer behaviour or transaction flow.
“I was inspired by nature to find the flow, by learning from my peers in climate research and applying the fluid dynamics of sampling river water to the way money moves through the financial services ecosystem. We developed a methodology to detect the ripples in the transaction flow where money had been injected. By applying the concept of the frequency and amplitude of waves to these “ripples” we were able to identify financial crime even when we were sampling further ‘downstream’ from the placement of illicit funds.”
Napier AI chief product officer Will Monk said, “The embedding of Insights AI into our Transaction Monitoring solution is all about ensuring the incredible data science behind the scenes is surfaced in a way that puts the power into the hands of AML analysts, to make the best possible human-in the loop decisions for the alerts.
“We lead with a compliance-first approach to AI in AML by partnering closely with the FCA so we can ensure our product aligns with regulatory guidance and meets policy goals around reducing the impact of economic crime on the UK.”
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