Upending the High-Risk Customers Equation with Intelligent EDD

You had to know it was only a matter of time for WorkFusion—the pioneer in AI Agents for FinCrime compliance—to bring revolutionary change to the enhanced due diligence (EDD) process at financial institutions (FIs) worldwide. After all, EDD represents an area of substantial investment and close to 25 years of sunken costs. So, it’s about time that someone gives FIs the opportunity to deliver on EDD’s promise of identifying and mitigating risk among the riskiest clients in their customer base.

With the introduction of AI Agent Edward, FIs can transform EDD with the proven AI Agent technology that already augments their analyst functions across multiple anti-money laundering (AML) processes. This means they can expect massive efficiency gains and vastly higher levels of performance and execution in EDD—just as the full lineup of WorkFusion AI Agents does for Level 1 analyst functions in adverse media monitoring, sanctions screening alert review, Know Your Customer (KYC), and transaction monitoring investigations (TM).

Why transforming EDD is a big deal

In his recent whitepaper, A Generational Shift in AML Compliance: How AI is Transforming Enhanced Due Diligence, David Caruso, head of financial crime compliance for WorkFusion, highlights the major impacts that transforming EDD will have on FIs. David notes that the scope of EDD is so broad today that an increase in its throughput of 3-5 times the normal rate represents a huge leap forward in program effectiveness. That’s exactly the type of EDD improvement that AI Agent Edward was designed to deliver. 

Consider this: when EDD first came about (following the Patriot Act), its scope was often limited to foreign correspondent banks and certain private banking accounts. Yet, EDD’s scope quickly expanded to include a wide range of products, services, and customer types. This led to the creation of teams of people doing EDD, along with substantial investments in people, systems, and processes. Yet, as David points out in the paper, “EDD today, without AI, remains strikingly similar to the EDD of 2007 – with little change in the reliance on manual and repetitive work.”

AI Agent Edward shifts the manual EDD paradigm to highly automated. Edward automates the exhaustive hunting and gathering, the tiresome copy, pasting and screenshotting as well as completing the initial analysis. This enables institutions to reduce the manual effort in EDD by approximately 40-60 percent. Think about that—three to five times the throughput at 40-60 percent manual effort. That frees your people to perform deeper, more efficient assessment of high-risk customers.

How AI Agent Edward improves high-risk review analyst functions

Edward’s core capabilities are designed to streamline high-risk reviews: 

• Accelerated Data Collection: Gathers crucial information from KYC, transaction monitoring, case management systems, and third-party sources. 

• Automated Organization: Structures and formats collected data into logical groupings to streamline investigator workflows. 

• Transactional Analysis: Analyzes transactional data against expected behaviors, identifying anomalies and trends. 

• Source of Wealth/Source of Funds: Automates background checks on key parties and identifies UBOs, confirms external registration status & licenses, retrieves and analyzes transaction history, etc. and constructs full output reports including proof of documents. 

• Focus on Assessment: Eliminates manual data entry, allowing investigators to focus on critical thinking and analysis 

• Delivers Ready-to-Use Dossiers: Generates comprehensive and formatted case dossiers (e.g. in Word) as a structured starting point for investigations. 

• Informs Risk Rating: Provides insights for more informed risk rating decisions. 

Edward can uniquely perform all these functions because his design is based on more than a decade of WorkFusion applying and blending both early forms of AI and more recent forms of AI with financial crime compliance domain expertise and targeted compliance process automations. As such, Edward’s capabilities include understanding language, processing documents, and creating content. Here’s how four of these technologies affect EDD: 

Intelligent Document Processing (IDP): 

• Role: IDP automates the extraction and structuring of data from complex documents, such as trust agreements, corporate ownership records, or KYC forms. 

• Impact: IDP scans and organizes unstructured data, reducing manual data entry. For example, it extracts ownership details from a 50-page partnership agreement in seconds. IDP also categorizes the extracted data into predefined fields, streamlining the template population process. 

Machine Learning (ML): 

• Role: ML analyzes transactional data to identify patterns, anomalies, and risks, performing tasks like peer group comparisons. 

• Impact: ML detects red flags (e.g., unusual wire transfers to high-risk countries) and traces funds across accounts. It compares a customer’s activity against expected behavior or similar entities, flagging deviations for review. ML’s predictive capabilities enhance the precision of risk identification. 

Natural Language Processing (NLP): 

• Role: NLP processes and summarizes textual data from news articles, media reports, or corporate filings. 

• Impact: NLP retrieves and filters relevant public records or adverse media. It identifies risk indicators (e.g., sanctions) and summarizes findings, reducing the time spent reading lengthy reports. 

Generative AI: 

• Role: Generative AI produces written summaries, visualizations, and draft rationales based on analyzed data. 

• Impact: GenAI creates timelines or funds flow diagrams. It generates concise summaries of transaction patterns or media findings. It can also support reasoning by drafting hypotheses, yet still incorporating human oversight to ensure accuracy. 

A final feature (and benefit) of using AI Agent Edward is that he never tires or grows bored of highly repetitive tasks, ensuring that his work is consistent and far less prone to missing leads than is the case with manual work.  

To learn more about AI Agent Edward for enhanced due diligence, request a demo today.