Should AI Be A Part Of Your Firm’s Compliance Strategy?
Contributors: Jasmin Sethi & Michelle Walczuk
Recently, we had the opportunity to participate at Boston Fintech Week on behalf of Saifr on a panel about AI’s application to financial marketing compliance. Boston Fintech Week is an annual convention focused on innovations in fintech, how it is evolving, and where it can go in the future. We discussed how AI has developed, how it’s expanding to assist in financial services compliance, and how it can help financial firms market products in ways that are more efficient and facilitate greater investor protection than with human intelligence alone.
Artificial intelligence has been around since the 1950s and has become an invaluable part of our world. Everyone knows AI’s applications in manufacturing and retail, but many may not see how it can be helpful in compliance.
AI has broad applications in financial services compliance. It can assist in addressing anti-discrimination in banking services, marketing traditional products, and promoting more accurate ESG Disclosures. It can also help firms with some of the challenges of the day, including cryptocurrencies, “finfluencers” (financial influencers), and the incentives created by gamification. In short, AI can process all of the internet and social media materials a lot faster than humans can, allowing human intelligence to be utilized for the more nuanced and sophisticated issues.
Not only are there numerous distinct financial products to evaluate and sell, but so much communication is coming out of the modern financial firm. It is too much to expect human reviewers to process - between advertisements, blogs, social media, and other mediums for speaking to the marketplace. Firms are constantly connecting with their customer and need compliance to keep up.
Saifr is currently working to address some of these compliance challenges. Saifr.ai streamlines the process of creating, reviewing, and approving new communications using AI and collaboration tools. Saifr has collected millions of quality data points that have been double-blind reviewed by regulatory experts and put through a series of deep neural learning algorithms to create an AI capable of Compliance risk detection, disclosure detection, and suggesting compliant language. It efficiently reviews marketing materials and suggests how they can be more compliant.
AI like Saifr’s can revolutionize the way firms handle their marketing. They can save money and time by reviewing marketing materials faster. They can increase consistency and release more communications without concern that they may break one of the many current marketing rules.
AI isn’t replacing the human reviewer. Humans will still review the AI’s assessment and determine what the firm should publish. With AI, firms can use human intelligence more intelligently.
Jasmin Sethi is the CEO of Sethi Clarity Advisers. SCA reviews marketing materials of financial products for compliance and is partnering with Saifr to develop AI compliance tools to review marketing disclosures.
Michelle Walczuk is a 3L at Cardozo Law School and a Research Associate at SCA.