Transforming Conventional Reconciliation and Transaction Monitoring

PwC’s Anomaly Detection Platform - An AI enabled solution to address anomalies and solve reconciliation challenges for C-Suite

Streamlined processes, proactive remediation and seamless compliance

In a post covid world which is rapidly navigating shifts of macro-economic nature, it has become imperative for executives to look inwards to avoid value leakage. Functions like Finance, Tax and Risk continuously struggle with large volumes of data in an attempt to ensure consistency. There is, therefore, a continuous need to interpret and analyse data and ensure exceptions don't get reported as routine, unreconciled items do not yield to misreporting or an exposure doesn't get regularised due to delayed addressal. 

With an ever increasing volume of data, coming from different sources and in all formats (structured and unstructured), it has become increasingly difficult to just rely on traditional ways (without technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)) of reconciling data and identifying anomalies.

PwC’s Anomaly Detection Platform is an AI-driven digital platform, which helps clients in detecting and preventing anomalies, reconciliation and continuous transaction monitoring including uncovering unknown patterns and risks using unsupervised ML methods.

Featuring unsupervised machine learning algorithms, the platform allows users to analyze in real time, all types of data-sets and in large volumes. Deployable on cloud or on-premise, the platform is industry agnostic and is equipped with a customizable data ingestor, powerful ML engine, NLG (Natural-language Generation), UI based BRE (Business Rules Engine) & persona-specific dashboards / workflows; and can be easily configured for multiple use-cases.

In a recent PwC IDC Spotlight, titled ‘Transforming Conventional Reconciliation and Transaction Monitoring: The Pivotal Role of AI-Powered Platforms’ (May 2023, #APTS7848X_FINAL), analysts state that, “PwC’s Anomaly Detection Platform is an AI-driven digital solution that can be leveraged for multiple operations such as reconciliation, anomaly detection, and transaction monitoring. It provides finance, risk, and compliance professionals with enterprise-grade capabilities for observability of business processes and AI-driven machine learning (ML) outlier analysis for effective financial reconciliation, identification of unknown patterns, and risk management.”

Manpreet Singh Ahuja, Partner and Chief Digital Officer at PwC India, has emphasized the need for intelligent platforms to do transaction monitoring and anamoly detection. PwC's Anomaly Detection Platform provides a comprehensive approach to reoccurring collations help CFOs to tackle problems such as value leakage, reputation risk, and inaccurate reporting. The platform uses an enterprise-grade AI that can handle large-scale data requirements in industries like FMCG and BFSI.

Ritu Rekha, Partner, Finance Transformation Leader, PwC India said, “As the journey towards digital Finance is progressing, benefit from bespoke solutions in Financial reconciliations across organisations have remained sub-par. This is primarily due to a reactive approach where focus has been on using technology to reconcile whatever data we get. We need a fundamentally different approach, one which fixes the processes and prevents anomalous data from getting generated by using intelligent technologies. PwC's Anomaly Detection engine allows organisations to uncover trends in the data, recurrent patterns and thereby have an intelligent way of managing reconciliations.”

Mukesh Deshpande, Partner, PwC India added, "With the growing volume of transactions, the reconciliation and transaction monitoring activities have become more challenging to manage. The fraudulent patterns emerging out of these challenges and the anomalies detection is a challenging task to solve using traditional approaches. Changing patterns can render both business rules and supervised models obsolete and hence, innovative solution approaches employing AI / ML models are key to solving this predicament. PwC's Anomaly Detection Platform allows businesses across industries to configure preset rules for detecting fraud and harnesses the power of unsupervised machine learning methods to identify novel and previously unknown risk-implying patterns, providing a more flexible and comprehensive approach to fraud detection in organisations."

Vidhathrae Krishnamoorthy, Partner, PwC India concluded, "There is a significant predilection towards automation delivering quick and accurate results in the areas of known unknown and unknown unknown, relating to big data. PwC's Anomaly Detection Platform brings in a technology blend of AI and ML, to the entire organisation by fulfilling the needs of both business and support functions, by a combination of speed, accuracy and business insights of the anomalies. Anomaly detection platform is geared to handle big data with an element of standard outcomes and organisation specific customisation to deliver desired results that addresses business and process complexities, hence extending its applicability to all industry sectors.”

Click here to read the IDC Spotlight