Unlocking the hidden value in innovation

In the U.S., identity thieves do tremendous damage—over $16 billion worth in 2017—by stealing personally identifiable information (PII) from unsuspecting customers. With new risks constantly emerging, cybersecurity is front and center for every business.

Our client, a top 10 financial services group with a deep commitment to community security, realized the importance of protecting PII in publicly stored bankruptcy filings. Looking to protect their customers, they identified the need to better secure PII at the source and prevent identity theft. While they relied on external legal vendors to process the paperwork, this system was prone to inaccuracies. Intelligent automation and artificial intelligence (AI) could help them create an entirely new remediation process, enhance cybersecurity across the financial industry and help protect the American public as well as support global practices in data protection.

The bank was equipped with a solution that put them at the forefront of cybersecurity in PII protection. With an innovative new process in place, they could devote more time to serving their customers and their external vendors could have the resources to successfully protect and remove PII elements. The bank has seen these benefits in that they have:

• developed an algorithm that can download, scan, and remediate millions of pages of documents

• instituted a solution that could identify cases and target specific documents for hidden PII, reducing human workload by 95 percent and download fees by 90 percent

• saved time and money while enhancing overall security

• focused more effort on financial services rather than legal and compliance issues

• transformed the process of electronic bankruptcy remediation.

The bank’s commitment to serving their community and customers compelled them to improve the processes behind bankruptcy remediation and protect the PII that was potentially vulnerable.

To help them achieve this, KPMG developed a new automation tool to secure the PII in public court documents. Three teams assembled in the quest: a team of rapid prototyping specialists to create a new technology, a group of bankruptcy specialists who used their know-how in decoding legal documents, and data scientists from KPMG’s Lighthouse innovation team who developed the complex AI needed for the algorithms.

The resulting solution was an intelligent automation tool that could automatically download, analyze, and remediate hundreds of thousands of documents totaling millions of pages. The tool redacted the PII contained in these documents that could have previously been extracted by fraudsters. It also greatly reduced the manual work involved in analyzing the files and removed reviewer bias inherent to manual processing.

With this new capability, the bank continues to care for their community’s privacy and safety. Their innovative approach to bankruptcy remediation advances the field of cybersecurity for the good of both their customers, plus the financial and legal industries.

New can improve

When taking on new projects, a lack of existing solutions isn’t a hindrance; it’s an opportunity to innovate. In this case, one is forced to think outside of the box since there is none—that is what we did. Building on iterative designs and having the flexibility to pivot with new challenges is the key to changing the game.

Knowing is half the battle

Intelligent automation doesn’t need to be confined to one project. Recognizing the capabilities of automation for one project can translate to success in other aspects of your business—even other solutions likes data science and machine learning.