How Consilient Is Innovating Financial Crime Prevention With AI featuring K2 Integrity's Juan Zarate
- Heather Harman
- Mar 12
- 3 min read
According to noted national security expert Juan Zarate, financial institutions have been in dire need of updated management technologies to match the current threat landscape. All of the “illicit finance challenges,” as Zarate put it in exclusive comment to GovCon Wire, demand a more effective, efficient and flexible system.
That’s where Consilient comes in.
Zarate, who was deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism at the White House in the 2000s, co-founded Consilient in 2020 with Dr. Gary Shiffman, a government affairs expert in his own right who served in a top Department of Homeland Security position, taught at Georgetown University for decades and is a go-to authority in all things artificial intelligence. Zarate is also a two-time winner of the prestigious Wash100 Award, GovCon’s highest honor.
An AI Inflection Point
AI is crucial to Consilient’s strategy; the company was ahead of the curve with the technology, seizing upon federated machine learning as a prime route to combatting financial crime risk years before ChatGPT ushered in the AI boom.
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Along its half-decade journey, Consilient has formed key collaborations with Intel and K2 Integrity, as well as international entities like Harex InfoTech to establish an interconnected, global network of partners.
We wanted to know more about how Consilient is leveraging AI and ML, so we got in touch with Zarate for a further investigation into what is unique about the organization’s approach to anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism, a.k.a. AML/CFT.
GovCon Wire: What problem is Consilient trying to solve?
Juan Zarate: Consilient’s mission is to be at the center of the redesign of this system so we are preventing financial crime and fraud more effectively and efficiently on a global basis. Consilient’s concept is simple, but the implications are transformational. We are the first company to apply federated AI (or federated learning) to help discover financial crime risk dynamically, collaboratively and more effectively across data sets, institutions, sectors and borders — without ever having to move, extract, or aggregate data.
This changes the paradigm for the management of illicit finance risks and fraud — moving to “insight sharing” through the sharing of models, as opposed to classic movement of data to share information; allowing data to reside and remain secure in situ, as opposed to trying to move or aggregate data into data lakes or secure enclaves; using behavioral analytics to discover unseen risk, as opposed to rules-based systems that result in 98 percent false positives in bank systems; allowing for collaboration between institutions and even between regulators and the private sector, as opposed to relying on slow, reactive ways to share information.
GCW: What results are you seeing with your customers and what’s your outlook for market expansion?
Zarate: What we are seeing with our clients is greater efficiency (massive reduction of false positives), effectiveness (discovery of unseen risk), and the ability to use Consilient’s exchange and federated learning and models to interrogate new data sets in ways impossible prior. This becomes all the more important as we have to discover more complex economic security risks in the environment — across regulatory regimes, institutions and borders — and with more and more payment disintermediation. The national economic security landscape is changing rapidly, and data will continue to be harder to move or access due to data privacy, security and sovereignty issues. Consilient’s platform, exchange and library of traveling models solves these issues by enabling dynamic risk management while preserving data privacy and security.
We are expanding Consilient’s work with financial institutions globally and are in discussions with regulators, Central Banks, and Financial Intelligence Units around the world to deploy Consilient as a tool of systemic risk discovery, regulatory oversight, and even audit. Consilient allows us to imagine an environment where different institutions, sectors and even government agencies are able to share insights dynamically to discover problematic or illicit behaviors in financial and commercial payments and transactions. This is game-changing at a time when companies and governments are looking for greater efficiencies and creative, safe ways to deploy AI.”
Read the original story in full here.