William Hill has partnership with Accuity, a provider of financial crime screening, payment services, and know your customer solutions, in a bid to establish “new efficiency standards” in the gaming industry.
The brand has recruited Accuity as it aims to transform 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 aligning with Accuity’s Firco Insight platform William Hill is to screen customers rapidly against sanctions and politically exposed persons 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.
Accuity maintains that Firco Insight “will enable William Hill to safely reduce false positive screening matches from a typical industry rate of 10-15 per cent to less than one per cent (without creating false negatives), by prioritising alerts according to the severity of the risk they pose”.
Steven Armstrong, group director of anti-money laundering at William Hill, stated: “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.
“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 is aiming to 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.
William Hill is the first gambling firm to adopt the solution, as it seeks to uphold the same standard of financial crime screening as global banks.
David Wilson, CEO at Accuity, commented: “We are very proud of this new partnership 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.”
