Tookitaki has won the Regtech Award for AI & Machine Learning and was highly commended in the solutions category for AML/CTF Compliance, in the 3rd Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence 2020 in an online ceremony on 15 December 2020.

Tookitaki has developed a Typology Repository Management (TRM) solution, which provides a new way of detecting money laundering through collective intelligence and continuous learning. TRM complements Tookitaki’s automated machine learning approach, which builds detection models based on historical learnings and nuances within the given universe of data.

The approach represents a move away from financial institutions having to manually hard code typologies into traditional transaction monitoring solutions, which today takes significant time, effort and investment to implement. Tookitaki’s TRM provides access to typologies from regulators, financial institutions, NGOs and other bodies in a machine-readable format, effectively creating thousands of risk indicators and establishing a federated ecosystem where firms can generate individual learnings in a decentralised way.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, while most financial institutions generated a large number of false positivesas a result of high volumes of ATM withdrawals, Tookitaki’s systems were instead able to recognise similar behaviours occurring across customer groups and update its models accordingly, thereby avoiding ATM activity being flagged as suspicious activity and reducing the manual efforts that would be required to investigate and close each case.

“Today’s AML monitoring solutions are largely rules-based. Even when machine learning techniques are used, they are often insufficient to adapt to changing market needs and customer behaviour,” said one judge on the awards panel. “Tookitaki’s approach fundamentally changes the way machine learning is applied to detecting financial crime. Its machine learning models are fully explainable, sensitive data is protected, and it does away with the need to custom-build typologies into monitoring systems. This will be a game-changer in the fight against financial crime.”

In the highly competitive AML/CTF Compliance category, Tookitaki was highly commended for its transaction monitoring and AML analytics solutions, which leverage its typology repository and automated machine learning to generate high-quality alerts for investigation. One of Singapore’s largest banks, UOB, in December, announced it deployed Tookitaki’s AML solution to screen all UOB accounts globally, having fully tested the solution over more than two years.

In October, Tookitaki was announced to win the monitoring and surveillance category at the G20 TechSprint challenge, for its cryptocurrency AML typology repository management solution.

The Regulation Asia Awards for Excellence recognises financial institutions, technology companies, legal and consulting firms, exchanges and other players that have helped meet the challenges of the ever-changing and increasingly complex regulatory landscape in Asia Pacific. Each year, submissions are diligently evaluated and award winners are selected by a panel of industry experts serving as judges.