An HSBC-backed startup is using AI to help banks fight financial crime — and eyeing a Nasdaq IPO

cnbc.com:

WARSAW — When it comes to financial crime, banks can often be «one decision away from a huge mess,» Martin Markiewicz, CEO of Silent Eight told CNBC.

That's because the risk of fines and reputational damage is high if financial firms don't do enough to stamp out crimes like money laundering and terrorist financing. But it takes huge amount of time and resources to investigate and prevent such activities.

Markiewicz's company uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help financial institutions fight these issues in a bid to cut the amount of resources it takes to tackle crime, keeping banks in the good books of regulators.

«So our grand idea for a product… (is that) AI should be doing this job, not necessarily humans,» Markiewicz said in an interview on Thursday at a conference hosted by OTB Ventures. «So you should have a capacity of a million people and do millions of these investigations… without having this limitation of just like how big my team is.»

With Silent Eight's revenue set to see threefold growth this year and hit profitability for the first time, Markiewicz wants to get his company in position to go public in the U.S.

Silent Eight's software is based on generative AI, the same technology that underpins the viral ChatGPT chatbot. But it is not trained in the same way.

ChatGPT is trained on a so-called large language model, or LLM. This is a single set of huge amounts of data, allowing prompt ChatGPT and receive a response.

Silent Eight's model is trained on several smaller models that are specific to a task. For example, one AI model looks at how names are translated across different languages. This could flag a person who is potentially opening accounts with different spellings of names across the world.

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