William Hill has announced a new collaboration with Accuity, the global provider of financial crime screening, payment services, and Know Your Customer (KYC) solutions, which will see the duo work together to establish new efficiency standards for customer screening in the gaming industry.
As part of the new partnership, Accuity will support William Hill in transforming its customer screening approach with AI techniques to analyse high volumes of customers with speed and accuracy, in support of its UK and international business.
By choosing Firco Insight, the Accuity platform that combines account screening intelligence with high-performance processing and scoring capabilities, William Hill will be able to screen customers rapidly against sanctions and politically exposed persons (PEPs) watchlists, prioritise risk, increase screening accuracy, and streamline the process.
Firco Insight flags high risk customers who may otherwise be missed and reduces false positives on lower-risk customers by combining name matching, risk scoring and big data.
Steven Armstrong, Group Director of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) at William Hill, said: “William Hill is always proactively looking for new ways to increase efficiency and enhance the experience of our customers. Following a successful proof of concept, we could see that working with Accuity and investing in this technology would help us achieve greater financial crime screening accuracy, without adding to our manual workload.”
Firco Insight will enable William Hill to safely reduce false positive screening matches from a typical industry rate of 10-15% to less than 1% (without creating false negatives), by prioritising alerts according to the severity of the risk they pose. This will enable the firm to avoid missing any truly high-risk accounts and ensure it can meet its financial crime obligations with confidence.
Firco Insight has been used primarily by financial institutions that have high volumes of customer accounts and considerable regulatory responsibilities. William Hill is the first gambling firm to adopt this solution as it seeks to uphold the same standard of financial crime screening as global banks.
Armstrong continued: “AI technology will never replace AML decision making, but it can certainly improve it. By minimising false positives, we will be able to reallocate resources, rather than managing an excess of false-positive flags.”
By focusing on the most relevant alerts, William Hill will increase the speed of entity resolution – the process of evaluating the validity of screening matches and deciding whether it is safe or ethical to conduct business with those customers.
The solution also provides a high degree of traceability and explainability, so the firm will be able to provide auditors and regulators with detailed information on how decisions were made.
David Wilson, CEO at Accuity added: “We are very proud of this project that marks a significant milestone for William Hill, Accuity, and the gaming industry. By utilising entity resolution filtering and AI techniques to form an explainable, safe and high-performance screening program, William Hill will achieve the same exceptionally high standards as the world’s largest banks. We look forward to working closely with the team at William Hill to deliver a new benchmark in customer screening for the gaming industry.”
Further discussing the collaboration and ‘the new normal’ for gambling as we come out of lockdown, Accuity will host the next SBC Webinar on Thursday 9 July (14.30 BST).
The firm will be joined by Steven Armstrong to discuss how online gambling’s compliance roadmap has been disrupted by the unprecedented events of 2020, as multiple regulators increase oversight on KYC and customer care demands on both a temporary and long-term basis.
To find out more about the webinar, click on the banner below.
