By PAUL O’DONOGHUE, Senior Correspondent
METRO Bank, one of the UK’s most prominent lenders, cut transaction monitoring alerts by 20% after deploying a new financial crime platform from SymphonyAI.
The bank said its existing financial crime systems no longer matched the pace of digital banking, according to a case study. The technology had first gone live almost a decade earlier. Over time, upgrades became difficult and costly.
As a result, Metro Bank sought a unified, cloud-native platform, said SymphonyAI – an AI software firm. “The bank needed a unified, cloud-native, future-ready platform capable of consolidating the full fincrime lifecycle,” SymphonyAI said. Metro Bank also aimed to embed dynamic CRA (customer risk assessment) and support continuous innovation without repeated system replacements.
Metro Bank selected SymphonyAI’s platform to overhaul its anti-financial crime approach. The new system included transaction monitoring, payment screening and name screening.
It also brought AML investigations, customer risk assessment, legal orders, court orders and ongoing due diligence into a single software-as-a-service environment.
Metro Bank and SymphonyAI system
A core objective was to integrate CRA directly with monitoring and screening tools. The new platform allows the bank to respond to internal and external risk triggers in real time.
Metro Bank had already developed machine learning models and intelligent exclusion rules outside its legacy platform. With SymphonyAI, these capabilities now run inside the core system. The models now “fully align with model governance, and [can] be confidently used at scale”.
After go-live, the platform grouped alerts at customer level. This reduced duplication, “producing a 20% drop in transaction monitoring alerts shortly after go-live,” said SymphonyAI. The bank can also update monitoring and screening controls more quickly while maintaining oversight.
The deployment took place in two phases. Payment screening went live in around four hours. A larger rollout covering CRA, transaction monitoring and AML workflows completed over a single weekend.
Mark McDavitt, Metro Bank’s Director of FCO & FCRC, said: “As one of the first institutions using the full capabilities of SymphonyAI software, Metro Bank is well positioned as a market leader in modern financial crime prevention.”
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