# AI-Powered Risk Intelligence Helps Modernize AML/KYC Investigations

> This whitepaper explores the current state of AML/KYC investigations and the value of AI-powered risk intelligence solutions for improving speed, accuracy, and confidence across financial crime compliance workflows.

**Published:** Oct 6, 2026  
**Topics:** AML/KYC, Financial Services, Agentic Risk Intelligence  
**Type:** white-paper

---

Examining data for customer screening during onboarding and periodically thereafter is a high-stakes, high-velocity process that too often overwhelms financial institutions. The sheer volume of data to be examined is complex, with hard-to classify fields, multilingual data, and data blind spots.

These escalating data volumes and increasing complexity create operational friction for FIs, making it harder for compliance teams to surface relevant risk signals, resolve entities accurately, and act with confidence. These challenges are exacerbated by FIs’ over-reliance on outdated screening technologies and rules-based processes that require significant human intervention.

Babel Street surveyed financial institutions of varying sizes to understand their compliance challenges around ID verification, development of customer risk assessments, initial sanctions screening, initial AML screening, and adverse media screening. In nearly all cases, these processes were inefficient and inaccurate.

**Register for this white paper **to learn how FIs can modernize AML/KYC investigations with AI-powered risk intelligence technologies that help process complex data, reduce manual friction, and support more confident decisions.