Whether you’re a general counsel, white collar attorney, a compliance officer, or a divorce attorney looking for hidden funds, at some point you’ve grappled with the same problem in financial investigations: drowning in data.
The Challenge of Data Processing
The task of sifting through mountains of bank and credit card statements has traditionally taken months of tedious effort that meant manually entering transactions into spreadsheets. The vast quantity of data is one major problem, as a typical financial investigation involves scrutinizing tens of thousands of transactions. But further complicating the task is that each bank and account type provides the data in different formats, so the data has to be “cleaned” and standardized as you go.
And when the data entry step is finally done, you’re still faced with the daunting task of analyzing all that data and trying to spot patterns that indicate potential fraud. Spreadsheets are useful for filtering data by a payer and a payee, viewing transactions by certain value thresholds, and other basic queries that help you find what you’re looking for — when you know exactly what you’re looking for. But they fall flat for identifying money flows and for spotting patterns such as structuring and layering that could indicate money laundering or fraud.
These data processing challenges cause months of delay in financial investigations and often lead to less accurate outcomes. The financial impact is high, both in terms of labor costs for performing the data cleaning and analysis as well as missing instances of financial crime and therefore lower recovery of funds.
Sedra Solutions: Analyze. Detect. Recover.
This very problem is the reason Sedra Solutions exists today. Founder and CEO Fahad Al Mutawa had been grappling with these inefficiencies at his forensic accounting consultancy firm. After searching high and low for a better solution — and hearing from colleagues and competitors that they needed this help as well — he knew the answer was to build an automated platform and make it available to everyone who needs to conduct financial investigations.
Using AI and machine learning, Sedra Solutions’ platform has reduced data ingestion time by up to 90%. And our advanced algorithms spot patterns in the data that were nearly impossible to see using traditional methods. The dashboard displays sophisticated views of the transactions and money flows so you can easily spot unusual patterns and connections among parties. It even has a geographic analysis that makes it easy to identify transactions all coming from within the same physical address, for example, which can indicate fraud rings.
The era of manually entering data into spreadsheets and spending weeks or months analyzing them are over. Using Sedra Solutions’ platform, legal professionals save enormous amounts of time and money and focus on what they do best: recovering funds for their clients.
If you’ve been drowning in data, we can help you get your head above water. To learn more about Sedra Solutions, visit our website, or just fill out this form and we’ll be happy to start a conversation about your specific needs.