AJ Bell reduces alert volumes by 82% while strengthening regulatory compliance with AI-powered customer screening

AJ Bell is a UK-based investment platform offering a range of products and services to make investing easier for the retail investors and financial advisers it serves. With offices in Manchester, London, and Bristol and over 593,000 customers, AJ Bell is one of the UK’s largest and best-known investment platforms. 

This status, along with the financial crime threats inherent to the investment management sector, means that AJ Bell faces high risk exposure and intensive regulatory obligations. Moving towards an efficient, automation-first approach to anti-money laundering (AML) compliance was a key step in meeting these obligations without inhibiting growth. 

Pairing effective screening with a smooth customer experience

For AJ Bell’s compliance team, success is defined by the ability to implement a strong framework to detect and prevent bad actors from misusing the company’s services without legitimate customers ever being aware of its presence. This balance between customer experience and protecting customers from exposure to financial crime was crucial as the company aimed for continued growth. 

While AJ Bell had a highly capable and motivated team in place, its ability to achieve these aims was limited by a legacy AML compliance setup, with fragmented tools and siloed data causing delays. Having assessed vendors against these key criteria of security and speed, AJ Bell decided to use ComplyAdvantage’s artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions for Customer Screening and Ongoing Monitoring. 

Overcoming complex challenges with AI

One of the main screening challenges it was experiencing related to linguistic nuances, such as differences in global naming conventions, spelling variants, and non-Latin scripts. Complex factors like these can cause problems for strictly rule-based or manual-first screening systems, causing unnecessary false positives while potentially missing genuine matches. To avoid the compliance bottlenecks and increased risk exposure this would cause, AJ Bell needed a system able to adapt to linguistic variations and support streamlined, accurate screening checks. 

“Making sure the system is configured well to address linguistic nuances is key to maintaining efficient and effective workflows.” 

Laura Lehane, Head of Financial Crime & MLRO, AJ Bell 

ComplyAdvantage’s screening platform uses flexible fuzzy matching to catch name variants or deliberately changed spellings, while search algorithms enhanced by machine learning can learn aliases and global naming conventions. Entity resolution improves the accuracy of alerts generated during the screening process. 

Other key features AJ Bell continues to benefit from include: 

• Real-time updates to risk data so customer risk scores can reflect the latest information. 
• Customizable rulesets and risk thresholds, allowing the company’s compliance team to tailor the solution to the specific risks it faces. 
• Consolidated customer profiles on one system, avoiding the need to switch between datasets and systems. 
• Data dashboards and analytics, providing insight into screening performance and identifying the causes of delays. 

By using these features to optimize the company’s compliance setup, AJ Bell has drastically reduced its alert volume by over 80 percent. This means analysts have been able to increase the speed of remediating alerts and redirect compliance resources to the highest-risk areas to support both compliance and growth goals. 

“Through optimizing the levers within the system, we’ve been able to reduce our alert volume by 82 percent.”

Laura Lehane, Head of Financial Crime & MLRO, AJ Bell 

Effective collaboration allows AJ Bell to demonstrate explainability and continually optimize 

Continued dialogue with ComplyAdvantage’s technical and Customer Success teams has been critical for AJ Bell to meet its regulatory obligations. As AI-driven AML solutions continue to increase in sophistication, explainability is a key priority for regulators, which means AJ Bell’s compliance team must be able to demonstrate how ComplyAdvantage’s solutions work and how our AI systems make decisions. 

“It’s really important for us to have strong relationships with our technology providers for our relationship with the regulator.”

Laura Lehane, Head of Financial Crime & MLRO, AJ Bell 

With fully explainable feedback loops, automated audit trails, and a thorough approach to model risk management, ComplyAdvantage’s platform has enabled AJ Bell to develop strong regulatory relationships and achieve transparent compliance outcomes. The company is now exploring using agentic AI, powered by ComplyAdvantage’s proprietary risk intelligence, for streamlined case remediation. 

This ongoing cross-team collaboration has also allowed AJ Bell to optimize its screening and monitoring solutions over time while dealing with any issues as soon as they arise. Stakeholders mentioned ComplyAdvantage’s proactive support, involving frequent check-ins rather than AJ Bell having to ask for help, as an important factor in continuing the relationship and something that stood out among vendors. This dynamic of two teams working together for the same outcome has compounded the efficiency benefits of ComplyAdvantage’s AI-driven AML solutions. 

“I highly recommend working with ComplyAdvantage. It’s been an absolute pleasure.” 

Laura Lehane, Head of Financial Crime & MLRO, AJ Bell