Customer engagement is the essence of our business.
We strive to make every project successful.
For over a decade, Exprentis has provided services and solutions that have helped to fulfill the regulatory compliance, risk management, and analytical needs of the financial services industry and its regulators. We have had many successful projects with both large and small firms.
Below, we have highlighted a few of our more challenging projects.
Dealing with Data
One of our major clients – a top 10 U.S. financial services firm – first came to us requesting AML and trading compliance analytical services. The firm had multiple lines of business, including retail and wholesale banking, brokerage services, wealth management services, international business locations, and operations on all continents.
We worked alongside their staff to develop and deploy multiple AML models for their retail banking business. This project, which helped improve their transaction monitoring, lead to a long term business relationship. Over the course of the next few years, Exprentis helped the firm improve data privacy issues for their wealth management department, developed and tuned trading compliance models for their brokerage arm, and worked with very large volumes of data to safeguard global transaction services and ensure compliance with wholesale banking regulations.
Tuning for Global Reach
A top-five investment bank approached us with a unique project a few years ago.
Exprentis was initially hired to validate tens of behavior detection models covering multiple business lines in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and to provide system optimization recommendations.
Our investigation uncovered numerous areas that needed improvement. To address the issues, we developed a blueprint for their risk scoring model and provided their staff with tutoring and seminars on model tuning techniques and methodologies. Then, to help staff members put their training into practice, we helped them re-tune the firm’s behavior detection models. The models began producing better alerts for their compliance departments, which lead to the implementation and deployment of a new risk model to help prioritize the alerts.
Identifying Problems in the Patterns
Some of our most challenging projects come from industry regulators. One in particular – an independent firm responsible for regulating multiple markets and members – came to us with a multi-project proposal. We were asked to develop and evaluate various compliance models and perform technology research and optimization for diverse transaction monitoring applications and various regulatory functions.
The goal?
To identify common behavior detection problem patterns among the multiple compliance technologies used; define outlines and/or pilot implementations for representative detection problems; create a classification of detection problems and identify the best practices for development and utilization of behavior detection models; evaluate detection capabilities of alternative technologies and products; and align the utilized tools with specific classes of behavior detection problems.
The result …
We delivered detection problem classes and implemented pilot alternative models for each class, provided detection model implementation guidelines developed from the class definitions and implemented those pilot models, designed and piloted the implementation of the detection data repositories, and created solutions for several key deficiencies of the utilized environment like version control, tuning flexibility, ability to react to data errors, multilayer detection.
Exprentis defined and developed several behavior detection models covering the energy and commodity trading compliance regulations, including:
- Wash Trades of the same energy or commodity products for no economic benefit
- Energy Trading ISO Limits driven by the FERC’s prohibition of Market Manipulation to create “congestion” in an energy product market
- Energy Cross Product Manipulation to identify trading activities of physical or financial energy instruments that may be indicative of manipulation of the settlement price
- Banging the Close that responds to the FERC’s EP Act 2005 and detects what CFTC defined as attempts to “mark the close” which is considered a trading abuse that is prohibited under the Commodity Exchange Act (“CEA”) as a form of manipulation
- Natural Gas Flow Capacity Release driven by the FERC Order 636 that mandates the available gas line capacity be released to the open market where all potential shippers have an opportunity to bid for released space.
The Exprentis team also performed analysis of the regulations, defined objectives for the behavior detection models, analyzed samples of market and firm trading data for occurring trading patterns, and developed detection models that responded to regulatory compliance requirements.
Small But Steady
Although large firms can offer big challenges and surprises, smaller firms gave us our start and continue to work with us to keep in step with the latest regulations.
One west coast retail banking institution, for example, initiated a long term series of projects with us. We performed evaluation and model tuning services to improve performance and enhance results of their AML Monitoring Solution. We’ve also analyzed data extracts and worked closely with their compliance analysts and technologists to identify areas for improvement in their retail banking and AML models.
Breaking New Ground
At Exprentis, we’re always looking to shape the future of knowledge engineering and we excel at projects that work toward that goal. Two of our clients – the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Agency and the Leidos Corporation – approached Exprentis with just such an opportunity.
The IARPA seedling TAILCM (Toward Automated International Law Compliance Monitoring) was developed to explore the feasibility of translating regulatory text — for example, laws from the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, or European Union regulations — to formal executable rules in an established standard such as RIF or Rulelog. Such formal executable rules can be input into a standard rule engine and could be a central part of an automated system to determine compliance with a set of regulations.
Exprentis worked with Leidos Corporation (SAIC) to choose a subset of U.S. financial regulations — insider trading and anti-money laundering regulations — as the domain for this seedling, although the research performed is expected to carry across many different domains. Exprentis’ was chosen for this project, because of the firm’s extensive background in the representation and utilization of regulatory knowledge bases for the financial services industry. The main role of the Exprentis was to build sets of training and testing examples of regulations used for the regulatory knowledge extraction process. The project results helped IARPA to make decisions about funding of future research programs in the area of the Automated International Law Compliance Monitoring.
For more customer success stories, please check out our news releases.