Quantexa Uses Context-Aware Artificial Intelligence to Uncover Human Trafficking Networks

Quantexa has developed revolutionary Entity Resolution and Network Analytics technology that enable deeper insights into complex financial and real-world criminal problems like human trafficking. Quantexa is able to use their technology to model and achieve a true understanding of groups and people and their relationship and their behaviors so that they can achieve genuine business outcomes, far superior to those achieved using traditional AI and machine learning.

Quantexa uses context-aware AI to helping uncover the vast criminal networks that underpin human trafficking, child exploitation and modern-day slavery.

Nextbigfuture interviewed Alexon Bell, head of Compliance Products at Quantexa. Alexon is a hands-on AML (Anti-Money Laundering) practitioner with over 16 years’ experience helping financial institutions with AML strategies, architectures and implementations. He has a wealth of experience in helping customers deploy and crucially optimise AML, KYC (Know Your Customer) and sanctions screening solutions, having held leadership roles at Actimize (Fortent), SAS as EMEA/AP head of compliance solutions and Oracle. As a thought leader, he works with banks to help them tackle the latest emerging threats, ensure coverage and prepare for new regulation in the fight against organised crime and terrorism.

Anti-human trafficking will be especially relevant as the Superbowl will be played next week. Big sporting events like the Superbowl, World Cup and the Olympics, regularly trigger an influx of sex-trade workers, with many being victims of human trafficking.

Arrests of pimps running underage sex rings are reported at the NFL Superbowl almost every year. Girls are being trafficked from as far away as Hawaii to hook up with clients via the Internet, hotels and strip clubs.

Some 1.5 million people in the United States are victims of trafficking, mostly for sexual exploitation. The majority are children, according to a U.S. Senate report published last year.

The Quantexa systems have advantages over other systems in that they can identify different companies and individuals in a more precise way. They can represent the correct relationships which are valid so that they do not generate false warnings. They can handle networks with over 15 billion records.

They are already helping many global organizations to solve financial crimes and indentify previously unknown criminal networks.

Beating Crime by Following the Money

Some common advice for investigators whether working in journalism or crime, is to follow the money. Money is the one thing that organized crime has in common, putting banks at the center in the fight to stop it.

By combining an institution’s transaction knowledge with information from outside databases like Dunne and Bradstreet or the Panama Papers, organizations can get a much more accurate view of entities and their relationships to each other – allowing them to uncover criminal enterprises and the channels being used to wash their dirty money.

Quantexa’s technology has already been helping banks to analyze their customers’ wider networks in their full context, using internal, publicly available and transactional data to flag suspicious activity. This combined with Deloitte’s market-leading financial crime prevention expertise will allow financial institutions to more accurately detect potentially illegal activity and provide a complete understanding of the overall risk.