NTT Data uses AI and low-code to speed up compliance checks by 270x

Challenge

The impossible task of being compliant in the 2020s

No matter the industry, being compliant is not optional—and if not done properly, it can lead to heavy regulatory fines and major reputational damage. With the recent geopolitical developments and the ever-increasing number of entities falling under sanction regimes, staying compliant has never been so complex.

“Sanction screening can be a highly manual and labor-intensive exercise,” explained Darren Temple, Vice President of Insurance at NTT Data. “It can require reviewing thousands of pages of documents with individual names, company names and registration numbers, and then entering those entities into a sanctions screening solution to check if they’re on a regulatory sanctions list or not.”

And when a company deals with thousands of transactions a day, this process can take thousands of hours. “You need a full army dedicated to this process, and still, you’re error-prone. Not to mention that most companies don’t have a budget for that,” said Darren.

To help its customers navigate the complexities of compliance, NTT Data set out to build a sanction compliance solution to automate the entire process and provide quick and reliable outcomes.

Solution

An AI sanction compliance service

Using OutSystems, NTT Data built the Sanctions Compliance Service, a software-as-a-service solution that leverages artificial intelligence to automate unstructured data extraction, identification, and screening processes within a sanctions check.

“Our customers can upload structured or unstructured data into the system, and the AI engine reviews and cleans up the data, removing all the noise, like additional spaces, foreign characters, or control characters, to create a perfect record,” explained Darren.

AI also matches the customer data with the regulatory sanctions lists. Then, NTT’s Business Process Outsourcing team reviews the matching in the sanction screening to remove any false positives before sending it back to the customer. As a result, the service identifies and returns any items with a strong possibility of a true match for a customers compliance professional to take action. Typically, this can be as little as 0.2% of the total entities screened. This means that the technology and BPO team complete the vast majority of the effort, leaving customers free to focus on the things they ought to be concerned about.

As an external-facing solution, the app interface needed to be user-friendly so customers could initiate the screening process via API or by simply dragging and dropping their documents. That made OutSystems the ideal solution—but it was not the only reason.

“The app needed to integrate with multiple external systems, namely the Eigen Technologies and Global Radar’s AI engines, and Auth0 for logging. Building the app in OutSystems allowed us to easily integrate all these systems, thanks to the platform's flexibility,” said João Pereira, OutSystems Tech Lead at NTT Data.

Another reason for choosing OutSystems was the speed of development and ability to make changes quickly. With just one tech lead and two developers, it took the company seven weeks to launch the first version. In less than a year, NTT Data had already launched version 2.

Results

High speed, high accuracy

With the Sanctions Compliance Service, a process that used to take hours and was highly error-prone, can now be done in seconds.

User feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, as shown by the comments shared by an end user, after NTT Data escalated only 5 matches to the customer after 14 days of continuous monitoring.

The service was initially rolled out to insurance customers, but the company is now expanding it to other industries. “Any sector that offers services can leverage this system. We’re now expanding to banking and technology companies, but the possibilities are endless,” said Darren.

As for the application’s future, NTT Data plans to migrate it to OutSystems Developer Cloud, the platform’s cloud-native solution. João explained: “The goal is to be even faster and evolve the solution even more efficiently. And that’s what we can get with the cloud-native architecture, Kubernetes, and containerization that ODC offers.”

After almost a decade as an OutSystems developer, João concluded: “Developing with OutSystems is all about efficiency. Instead of wasting time writing 300 lines of code, you can start from existing components and extend it as you wish with JavaScript, .NET, or whatever language you prefer and take your apps to an enterprise level. It’s the best of both worlds.”