Your compliance department may be the largest untapped resource for new income generation at your company – and you could be missing it. But investing in the right innovative software can change that.

Compliance departments have historically been maligned as a significant cost of doing business, sometimes even considered a revenue killer. With a perceived adversarial atmosphere between business and compliance, banks have been leery of providing more resources to their compliance divisions than they legally have to. But imagine what could be gained if you saw compliance as an ally to be invested in, instead of a rival to be dealt with.

Anti-money laundering detection (AML) is a nuanced and challenging investigative field within compliance. Governments require banks to scrutinise trillions of daily transactions to determine which could represent illicit activities. With the heavy fines and sanctions that can be levied against banks for negative findings, combined with the stale tech that is being used today to detect suspicious activity, many institutions have opted to de-risk numerous market segments, including charitable organisations and economic regions such as Africa and South America. This has left potentially millions of new customers and billions in untapped revenue on the table.

New technologies supporting more effective data mining and enhanced AI will assist analysts to better detect, investigate and report money laundering activities. The ability to find these anomalies within such large data environments leads to both a higher quality of data and more comprehensive analytics, allowing you to better define your risk profile. This in turn empowers you to expand your risk tolerances and re-examine where your bank can make new inroads into these once restricted markets.

Additionally, investments in your AML program provide technology that can be used to generate revenue in other parts of your organisation. Think about the potential of new products and services that could be developed in payment processing or credit if you developed a new way to find pattern-based anomaly movement within customer markets, not to mention the advantages you would have over the competition.

The first step to opening these new markets while fulfilling regulatory requirements is partnering with innovative regtech firms that understand both the technical and financial sides of AML, and that can help turn compliance from an expense to a revenue generator. Working with companies focused on these goals not only assists you with today’s needs but prepares you to meet the ever-changing scope of compliance while opening new markets of the future.