Leveraging 2022 Strategic Investments, Giant Oak, Inc., today announced that the GOST adverse media platform achieved operational milestones, enabling affordable continuous screening of all entities such as customers and third parties, at historic rates in excess of 1 analyst per 10,000,000 entities.

ARLINGTON, Va., Feb. 14, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Giant Oak, Inc., the only behavioral science-led AI/Machine Learning company in the KYC space, today announced that GOST exceeded performance metrics in operations related to scale, speed, and accuracy. Enabled by a strategic investment from one of the largest financial institutions, and with continued participation from lead investor Edison Partners, the Giant Oak team expanded GOST’s industry-leading capabilities to meet the growing demand of pKYC and Adverse Media continuous monitoring across customers, correspondent relationships, and other Third-Parties.

“The challenge we accepted over the last two years was one of scale; GOST has out-performed every incumbent in the market for adverse media screening as measured in effectiveness and efficiency, has done so in utility-like fashion with privacy-preserving uses of Transfer Learning. But we lacked the scale to deploy at the largest institutions,” said Giant Oak founder and CEO, Gary M. Shiffman. “With fantastic strategic partners and customers, as of today GOST is enabling one person to screen ten million customers every day — a truly historic milestone certain to impact the market.”

This expanded capability enables financial institutions and FinTechs of any size to immediately respond to the U.S. Treasury Department’s FinCEN AML/CFT Priorities. Giant Oak planned for three trends which guided the allocation of the most recent strategic investment:

1. Entity Resolution: The single largest challenge to securing the global economy – to include identifying financial crime and maintaining trust in financial institutions and FinTechs – comes from the unsolved challenge of resolving online identities. GOST now stands on the commanding heights of entity resolution across unstructured text.
2. Supply Chain and FinTechs: Growing collaboration between regulated banks and their growing relationships, increasingly with the FinTech marketplace, introduces new complexities in compliance. GOST working at scale and speed provides confidence in coverage across the entirety of the risk landscape. 
3. Third–Party Risks: Financial Institutions face increasing regulatory focus and pressures on third-party relationships. U.S. Federal Banking Agencies are expected to increase their enforcement actions against banks who do not take adequate steps to measure risks in 3^rd parties such as correspondent banking customers and customers’ beneficial owners.
4. Tight Budgets: Understanding that talk of economic recession might cause our customers – banks, FinTechs, and government agencies – to cut budgets for non-revenue generating functions such as financial crimes compliance, GOST needed to leverage the utility-like nature of AI and Transfer learning to reduce operating costs significantly while also increasing effectiveness at identifying important risks.

“The team delivered,” said Harsh Pandya, president of Giant Oak. “The backlog is dead; continuous monitoring and perpetual KYC are here. As of today, we have independent third-party validation that GOST accomplishes more risk discovery (+80% more) with lower False Positive rates (47% lower).” 

“I’m grateful to our largest institutional customer for all that we’ve learned about earning trust and deploying Machine Learning-based solutions at scale,” continued Pandya. “We’ve learned that the compliance industry moves with great caution, and only after careful diligence. I am now sure that, regardless of size, GOST will identify previously unknown risks to financial institutions and threats to the public we all serve. GOST gets better information to those charged with public safety and security – this is the reason we do what we do,” Pandya added.

“Giant Oak’s mission is to empower those on the front lines of financial crime discovery and compliance. GOST makes these people superheroes by massively improving the effectiveness of their valuable time and minimizing the morale-killing false positives,” said Jon Elvin, Giant Oak’s Chief Commercial Officer and formerly BSA/AML and Chief Compliance Officer at one of the top ten largest banks. “I cannot see the future of technology, but I can now see how much better banks can do with adverse media risk discovery using GOST for onboarding and pKYC. The choice is simple. Since BSA and Fraud Executives cannot avoid the growing screening burden, they can ride the wave of increasing costs of compliance and fraud loses, or adopt GOST. BSA Officers trust each other; that’s what keeps our industry strong. The news of this scale milestone in production will spread quickly. It will begin to drive decision-making confidence and trust at other institutions that it is okay to take similar journeys, and in fact, they must. Responsible innovation, grounded in trust and true effectiveness with efficiency, is so important to all stakeholders,” continued Elvin.

About Giant Oak: At Giant Oak, we build trusted tools at the frontiers of behavioral science and artificial intelligence that enable you to make both rapid and informed decisions in an increasingly dynamic security environment. GOST^® (Giant Oak Search Technology) makes screening easy. GOST^® is an open-source search and triage tool that builds a custom internet domain and organizes information to detect suspicious behavior. GOST^® re-indexes the open and deep webs to return publicly available electronic information (PAEI) in prioritized results relevant to the user’s requirements. By deploying machine-learning algorithms to refine search results and generate analytic scores, entities are sorted by relevance and threat level. For more information, visit www.giantoak.com.

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SOURCE Giant Oak, Inc.