AI leader Mozn's founder and CEO explains why the future of crime fighting rests in our ability to leverage data and artificial intelligence to outfox the predators that plague us. Saudi Arabia's LEAP conference was established to gather the world's tech innovators, investors, and experts to collaborate on solutions to the issues of the day. The spirit of the event is one of progress through knowledge sharing. LEAP23, the event's second edition, takes place at a time when the region faces a challenging horizon, peppered with issues waiting to be addressed – the economy, the environment, and many others. Including crime. Saudi Arabia-born Mozn has fast risen to become a market leader in enterprise AI technologies and an important voice in the industry regarding not only technology advancement but movements in the challenges various adopters face. At LEAP23, the company will be showcasing its AI-powered solutions and products amid a surge in interest in smart technologies for solving a range of societal issues, including financial crime. Mozn's FOCAL platform has proved to be an important step forward in the fight against financial crime. The financial crime prevention system, which recently passed the milestone of running its billionth security and identity check, screens customers using advanced name-matching algorithms designed specifically for Arabic- and Latin-text characters and compares them against more than 1,300 up-to-date global and local sanctions and PEP (politically exposed persons) lists. "Fraudsters are wreaking havoc on financial systems, largely because institutions now offer their services mostly through digital channels," said Dr Mohammed Alhussein, Founder and CEO of Mozn. "FOCAL leverages AI to combat this problem by keeping pace with fraudsters and maintaining the trust that is critical for a successful financial sector. The platform enables financial institutions to be compliant with the regulations of central banks and capital markets, and to protect the institution's customers from fraud." Digital transformation – while an enabler of innovation in many industries – has globalised crime. Countries on every continent have passed legislation and launched taskforces to take the fight to the fraudster. "Saudi Arabia's central bank is coming out with very promising innovations to ensure that banks have controls and safeguards to protect the financial system," said Dr Alhussein. "Of course, at Mozn, we play a part in this ecosystem by providing products that financial institutions can leverage to combat fraud." Mozn will use LEAP23 to launch FOCAL Anti-Fraud – an extension to the FOCAL platform that can, among other things, confirm the identity of payees by automatically tallying sender information about the recipient's account with that held on record at the destination. A broad range of datapoints come together to derive a Fraud Score metric for each transaction, which allows faster decisions by compliance officers. "FOCAL Anti-fraud automatically authorizes, rejects, or restricts transactions based on whether it judges them to be legitimate," said Dr Alhussein. "Obviously, this is a significant time-saver for all stakeholders, who can detect fraudulent activity right down to the devices, IP addresses, and other attributes used by modern law-enforcement." Mozn is one of Saudi Arabia's most prominent tech success stories. It was founded in 2017 and in just five years has established itself as prominent industry presence and sophisticated innovator. "Mozn is a Saudi-born company with an incredibly talented team based in the kingdom, the UAE and the UK. We are proud that 34% of our people are women. We have an amazing culture – a unified dedication to the harnessing of technology and AI to help real businesses add real value."
