Deloitte: delivering disruptive technology to more efficiently combat financial crime

Since 2021, Deloitte Switzerland has been partnering with Linkurious to deliver powerful investigative technology to Deloitte clients fighting against financial and economic crime. At the same time, Deloitte’s own forensic analytics and financial crime teams in Switzerland have also adopted Linkurious Enterprise to deliver top solutions for investigations, internal audits, AML alerts review, KYC activities, and more. Linkurious Enterprise harnesses the power of graph analytics, creating a holistic view of the entities relevant to investigations - people, transactions, companies, etc. - and their relationships. It helps analysts and investigators uncover even the most complex criminal schemes and effectively fight financial crime.

“Thanks to the partnership with Linkurious, we have premium access to graph technology,” says Christophe da Silva, Director of Data Analytics and eDiscovery at Deloitte Switzerland. “We believe that the partnership with Linkurious is helping us expand our forensic analytics and financial crime business and, on top of that, to better serve our clients by addressing their challenges.”

“As a globally recognized innovator, Deloitte is for us a key partner to provide our clients with the expertise they need to efficiently fight against financial crime,” says Giulia Rotondo, Partner Manager at Linkurious. “The teams at Deloitte Switzerland have been extremely fast to adopt and master Linkurious Enterprise and we are proud to partner with them and deliver excellence together.”

Detecting and investigating complex financial crime is in part a problem of connected data. Understanding the full context around suspicious activities gives investigators the necessary insights to effectively uncover incidents of fraud and money laundering. 

Deloitte frequently deals with highly interconnected data stored across multiple siloed IT systems. With traditional relational databases, the relationships between data points are not apparent and need to be reconstructed to obtain meaningful insights. When a problem requires analyzing large volumes of connections with multiple levels of separation, solving that problem becomes too complex with traditional databases. Linkurious Enterprise proved to be an ideal solution for surfacing hidden connections. 

Take the example of knowledge discovery for investigations, where Linkurious has proven effective. “By leveraging our forensic and financial crime expertise we developed custom graph analytics functionalities that our clients use to accelerate the exploration of their data and reveal hidden connections. Using these functionalities, our clients are able to reconstruct connections involving multiple levels of separation that would be impossible to identify with the traditional systems available to the investigation team,” says Leonardo Brizi, Senior Manager at Deloitte Forensic. No matter where those connections lie, they are visible to investigators, since both clients’ internal data and information from external sources can be accessed through Linkurious Enterprise, offering a unique entry point.

The Deloitte Switzerland team considers graph analytics an important tool to support investigators and financial crime compliance teams conducting analysis more efficiently and effectively. Using a graph solution accelerates analysts’ exploration of connected data and enables end users to run complex network analytics searches. Linkurious Enterprise’s advanced search capabilities “really bring added value when you are at the early stage of an investigation and you do not have all the information or accurate information on hand,” says Christophe da Silva.

Providing their clients with these capabilities reduces the time investigation specialists spend on low-value tasks like manually reconstructing connections between entities within tabular data or data gathering from different systems. “Linkurious can really help organizations to refocus their resources on high-value operations and spend more time on actual investigations,” explains Christophe da Silva.

Deloitte believes that the use of this technology can also significantly speed up the way financial crimes are discovered and investigated by financial institutions. They are already seeing this in action. One banking client noted that the solution significantly accelerated the exploration of connections. In some cases, the client was able to identify complex hidden connections between multiple entities within a few seconds. The client noted that the same analysis would have taken days to perform with their traditional tools based on tabular information.

“We see graph technology as a fundamental ingredient to make the fight against financial crime more effective and efficient,” says Christophe da Silva. And for Deloitte, Linkurious is “the key player in terms of maturity, features, and capacity to further develop.”

Linkurious brings value to Deloitte and their clients by accelerating investigations and opening the possibilities of graph analytics to both technical and non-technical users.

“Linkurious Enterprise allows non-technical people to access graph capabilities in a friendly way. All the complexity is removed for the end user who can access very powerful graph exploration capabilities via simple actions,” says Christophe da Silva. Linkurious Enterprise also allows for a high level of customization, enabling each end user to easily adapt the graph visualizations to their needs without any technical expertise.

“Based on the experience we gained in deploying this technology with our clients, we expect that graph analytics and Linkurious Enterprise have the potential to transform and positively impact the way compliance and legal investigation functions conduct their operations,” says Christophe da Silva. 

This is just the beginning of the journey together, as Deloitte is already beginning to expand the scope of Linkurious Enterprise to other use cases. They have notably used the platform to support the optimization of computations performed in the context of a supply chain management project. “We want to secure and strengthen our collaboration in order to take full advantage of the Linkurious technology,” says Christophe da Silva. 

Linkurious has also begun collaborating with other Deloitte teams in Europe and North America, who have been adopting graph technology as a part of the transformational journey towards the next generation of advanced analytics.