To start us off, can you tell us a bit about your role at Danske Bank and your focus within Financial Crime Prevention?
I lead the Financial Crime Prevention team with responsibility for protecting both our customers and the Bank from financial crime. Our work spans customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, fraud detection and prevention, and importantly supporting and educating customers who may be at risk or who have already been impacted by fraud.
As financial crime becomes increasingly digital and fast moving, we need to harness available technology along with close collaboration across the industry, including working with technology partners, law enforcement, and other financial institutions to ensure we are identifying emerging threats early and responding in a way that is both effective and customer centric.
Without giving too much away ahead of April, how are you seeing identity and financial crime attacks become more sophisticated through criminal use of AI?
Across the industry we have seen an increase in the use of AI including for the generation of identity and documents used to support account opening and digital onboarding. We have also seen AI used to create convincing scam journeys through eg fake investment advertisements and personalised communication that appear legitimate. AI also gives criminals the ability to scale operations enabling them to run high volume campaigns with relatively low cost, increasing the number of potential victims and overall impact of fraud.
How do you see AI acting as both an opportunity and an evolving threat within the financial crime landscape?
AI enables industry to move away from eg static rules based fraud controls to more dynamic, intelligence-led detection. AI can analyse large volumes of data, identify complex patterns and identify suspicious activity that would be hard to detect manually improving detection and operational efficiency.. However, the same technology can be exploited by criminals. It is a cost effective way for criminals to scale their attacks and add legitimacy to their scam journeys. Financial Services need to keep pace with increasing sophisitication and criminal’s adaptability.
Can you share your perspective on how AI-enabled identity theft, impersonation, document forgery, and deepfakes are challenging current verification processes?
The industry needs to stay ahead of the fraudsters in the identification of AI generated content or identity theft. Addressing this requires a joined up approach across financial services, tech and telecom to detect and prevent the use of AI generated material to perpetrate a crime. No single organisation can tackle this risk in isolation.
Can you please outline some examples that you are seeing of criminals using AI to outpace existing financial crime controls?
Criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated in developing AI synthetic ID’s and deepfakes enabling entirely fictitious customers to open accounts and carry out financial crimes. We are also seeing increased use of AI driven impersonation with voice cloning and deepfake video. Individuals are being deceived into authorising payments based on a sense of urgency and trust in the fake. They demonstrate how human judgement can be manipulated with convincing AI.