Pelican AI (pelican.ai), a global provider of Artificial Intelligence-powered payments and financial crime compliance solutions for banks and corporates, announced today that the Treasury Services business of leading global bank BNY Mellon is implementing its AI-based Pelican Secure Sanctions Self-Learning Optimization™ (SSLO) solution in the coming months to drive efficiency in their global sanction screening capabilities.

Pelican AI was successful in a competitive proof of concept – demonstrating that this AI-based solution will drive a high success rate for reducing false positives that require time-consuming investigations by operations staff.

Pelican Secure SSLO employs advanced AI technologies to analyze transactions that are flagged for investigation by the bank’s existing sanction screening tools. Pelican SSLO uses machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to understand and interpret human actions, helping to classify and explain the false positives generated. This allows the bank’s compliance operation to resolve false positives much more quickly – reducing inefficiencies and freeing up valuable resources.

“This is an important project within BNY Mellon Treasury Services’ compliance operation that is leveraging AI to improve operational efficiencies without compromising regulatory needs and simultaneously safely removing friction from the payments landscape for our clients,” said Matthew Wells, Head of Global Markets, Issuer Services and Treasury Services Operations at BNY Mellon.

“We decided to work with Pelican AI following a successful proof of concept using their SSLO product. This solution provides full control in this critically important part of the payments value chain. We believe that this is the start of a long-term relationship with Pelican and look forward to working closely to optimize our operations in the area of sanctions screening and payments,” Wells added.

Parth Desai, founder and CEO of Pelican AI commented: “It is a great privilege to welcome BNY Mellon Treasury Services as a Pelican customer. Pelican SSLO is designed to integrate with and complement existing sanctions screening tools, and dramatically reduce the time taken to process false positives from existing compliance systems. The system is able to continuously learn and maintains high levels of false positive reduction. We are confident that BNY Mellon will find that our technologies far exceed expectations as we embark on a long-term relationship together to build operational excellence in the areas of compliance and payments.”

Financial institutions face significant penalties and reputational risk for non-compliance with sanctions screening, but at the same time are under constant pressure to increase processing speeds and efficiency to enhance the customer experience. Sanctions screening systems are complex and process high volumes of transactions, so even a small amount of false positives requiring manual intervention drive costs for compliance on an ongoing basis. 

Pelican Secure Sanctions Self-Learning Optimization works with a range of existing third-party screening tools. The underlying Pelican AI technology platform has been live across a number of global banks for several years, processing over one billion transactions valued at over US$5 trillion.