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SymphonyAI is solving real problems across industries with Azure AI

SymphonyAI is making AI work for businesses and revolutionizing fraud detection with groundbreaking solutions like Sensa Investigation Hub and Sensa Copilot.

June 26, 2024

SymphonyAI delivers cutting-edge, AI-powered software as a service (SaaS) products across diverse industries, and it's their pioneering innovation in cloud technologies and AI that earned the company a 2024 Partner of the Year Award for AI Innovation in the Business Transformation category.

A Microsoft partner since 2022, SymphonyAI's success stems partly from their cloud-first strategy. By focusing on data and AI and building with Microsoft Azure, SymphonyAI offers a reliable and secure platform with global scalability. With Azure at the forefront of AI transformation, SymphonyAI is equipped to innovate at an extremely rapid pace, enhancing their offerings and delivering significant value to their clients.

"SymphonyAI uses the power of predictive and generative AI to transform business processes," said Sanjay Dhawan, SymphonyAI CEO. "This approach of using predictive and generative AI together transforms complex data into actionable insights, and fuels growth and operational efficiencies across industries."

Since their inception in 2017, SymphonyAI has rapidly expanded, now boasting a workforce of more than 3,000 talented leaders, data scientists, and other professionals who develop innovative AI products for industries including retail, financial services, manufacturing, IT, and media. One of SymphonyAI's cutting-edge vertical AI products, the Sensa Investigation Hub, helps financial institutions around the globe tackle an increasingly complicated threat that could affect anyone: financial crime.

As tech becomes more sophisticated, so does crime

Estimated to account for as much as 5% of the global GDP each year, financial crime places a significant burden on economies and impacts countless organizations and individuals. At the same time, financial institutions must contend with stringent legal requirements, an almost incomprehensible number of transactions, and aging fraud detection technology that can lead to a deluge of false alerts, wasting billions of dollars in investigative efforts.

"For financial institutions, the need to invest in financial crime management is both mandated—through compliance obligations driven by regulation—and strategic," said Sarah Smith, Head of Financial Services Product Marketing at SymphonyAI.
"Strong risk assessment helps prevent financial crime, reduces losses, and supports a healthy financial ecosystem. The hard part is the cost of doing this. The value of prevention is hard to calculate, whereas the cost of prevention scales as the bank grows, and risk rises."

As a result, banks and financial institutions need a helping hand with tracking, monitoring, investigating, and reporting financial fraud and other crimes. That helping hand comes in the form of SymphonyAI's Sensa Investigation Hub and Sensa Copilot.

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"Strong risk assessment helps prevent financial crime, reduces losses, and supports a healthy financial ecosystem. The hard part is the cost of doing this."

—Sarah Smith, Head of Financial Services Product Marketing, SymphonyAI

Empowering investigators for a safer future

Built on the company's advanced generative and predictive Eureka AI architecture, the Sensa Investigation Hub accelerates analysis with a generative AI assistant that sources, summarizes, and analyzes data at scale. The Sensa Copilot, built on Azure, combines the predictive and generative AI capabilities of Eureka AI with the all-in-one, next-gen financial crime-fighting prowess of the Sensa Investigation Hub. Melding advanced AI with industry expertise is the secret sauce for SymphonyAI products.

"Predictive AI excels at identifying suspicious patterns and anomalies to uncover money laundering schemes," said Raj Shukla, CTO at SymphonyAI, "while generative AI enables investigators to conduct deep analysis and automatically generate suspicious activity reports (SAR), all through intuitive interfaces that fit seamlessly into users' workflows."

The Sensa Investigation Hub—which is detection agnostic—connects and consolidates a customer's existing infrastructure, giving investigators a single view into investigations. It can identify behaviors indicative of money laundering to help these activities get addressed swiftly and accurately. Acting as a sophisticated AI assistant for financial crime investigators and built into the Sensa Investigation Hub, the Sensa Copilot helps automate the collection, collation, and summarization of financial and third-party information. Using the Sensa Copilot's natural language interface, investigators can conduct analyses, explore data sources, and determine the legitimacy of alerts. If suspicious behavior is detected, the Sensa Copilot assists in summarizing key risk factors and drafting the SAR.

"Helping financial institutions be more efficient and effective means understanding the strength and power of differing AI models and approaches," said Jason Shane, Head of Strategy and Innovation at SymphonyAI Financial Services. "SymphonyAI's products use predictive—supervised and unsupervised—machine learning to detect previously undetected risk and reduce false positives, while new generative AI capabilities empower investigators to do their jobs even better. This synergy reduces criminal opportunities, maximizes resources, and fosters a secure financial environment."

SymphonyAI puts responsible AI principles at the core of their technology, including transparency and explainability. The Eureka AI architecture, supported by Azure OpenAI and Azure API Management, supports data privacy and customer safety with cloud, hybrid, or on-premises operations—essential when dealing with sensitive data for individuals and large, multinational corporations alike. Built-in authentication and access control at data and API layers confirm data doesn't reach large language models without permission.

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"Helping financial institutions be more efficient and effective means understanding the strength and power of differing AI models and approaches."

—Jason Shane, Head of Strategy and Innovation, SymphonyAI Financial Services

Boosted productivity, simplified compliance—and more transformations to come

Early tests of the Sensa Copilot demonstrated a 70% increase in productivity for financial institutions' compliance departments, with the AI technology acting as a force multiplier by sourcing, summarizing, and analyzing data at scale. When combined with predictive AI models, financial institutions can benefit from up to 70% fewer false positives while detecting 30% more risks meriting suspicious activity reports.

"We expect that investigations can be completed up to 60-70% faster, with around 70% less effort on the part of the human investigator," said Meghan Palanza, AML Product Manager at SymphonyAI. "Customers have also reported immediately seeing efficiencies in labor with investigators enabled to cover far more ground in a fraction of the time. That is a transformational shift in financial crime investigation."

Always focused on the future, SymphonyAI has committed USD100 million over the next three years to develop new generative and predictive AI for their vertical applications across industries. This investment, combined with Azure OpenAI's capabilities and the partnership between SymphonyAI and Microsoft, is poised to help businesses create a fraud-free future—and to transform industries around the world.

"Our mission, in collaboration with Microsoft, is to combine their robust horizontal platforms with SymphonyAI's vertical AI applications," said Kumar Abhimanyu, Senior Vice President & Global Head of Strategic Partnerships at SymphonyAI. "Together, we aim to deliver valuable AI solutions tailored to key strategic industries, empowering enterprise workers and shaping the future of business."

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