Taking down dirty money

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Ready to explore the extraordinary world of tech? Welcome to the XTech podcast where we connect you with the sharpest minds and leading voices in the global tech community. Join us as we cut through the complexity to give you a clear picture of the ideas, innovations, and insight that are shaping our future.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Hello and welcome to XTech podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster MBE. I’m a tech portfolio consultant and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry.

Now today I am delighted to be joined by Eddie Vaughan. He’s the VP of Banking and Financial Services at Chorus Intelligence. Eddie, thanks for joining us.

Eddie Vaughan:
Hi, Debbie. Great to be here.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Right. Eddie, one of the best things I’ve enjoyed on doing this whole podcast series is the journey into tech, because everybody seems to take a different route in. Some born as a techie with a laptop in hand, others wake up and accidentally find themselves here. Eddie, I think you have an interesting background. How did you find yourself in tech?

Eddie Vaughan:
Crikey, I absolutely was not born with a laptop in my hand. I think my move into technology, if we think about my career to date, certainly the early part of my career is really been around what I would describe as that operational user or manager of a wide range of systems. Be those the intelligence systems that we used within serious and organised crime investigation in government departments or those banking platforms that we used within financial services, so fraud detection, screening, transactional monitoring. But through being that super user of those platforms and being the person that the business looks to explain how we use those systems, you over time develop that deep technical understanding.

So, whilst I’ve never been a coder, I’ve always had that keen interest in understanding how technically these systems and technologies work under that UI surface layer. So whilst I’ve not been a techie per se around coding, I’ve always been able to understand technology architecture of the systems and translate that into actionable business applications.

I think that served me really well later on in life, particularly as I’ve moved into more of a commercial role. If we think about those stakeholders that we have in our sales process now, it’s more indicative that we’re going to have technical buyers, CTOs, chief architects. Being able to have those technical-level discussions around how our software works, how it interoperates with your systems, it’s quite critical now as well.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I think what’s interesting, because you didn’t even start in financial services, did you? It was right out there. Your early career was somewhere very different. Talk to me about that?

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. That’s correct. My early part of my career was in the military. I had the opportunity working for military intelligence. I served in Iraq, in Northern Ireland, and then a move into counterterrorism policing, so being part of major national security investigations. That’s really where, we are going back over 20 years, Debbie. That’s really where technology starts to come into play, the ability to process and analyse bulk data to see what matters and to move faster at an operational pace to deliver the insights that people need from huge amounts of data.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I think it’s interesting because it is the right place, right time. I think the time is the important piece because at that stage that was that transition where investigations, whether it’s military or criminal, you’re really starting to understand the power of tech and the necessity of using tech in that respect.

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. Absolutely. That really was my first involvement with Chorus actually going back over 15 years I think now. Chorus isn’t a start-up business. It isn’t a scale-up. It’s incredibly well established. I was actually a version one user of Chorus’ Intelligence systems back then, which was primarily designed around how do organisations make sense of all of this huge amounts of data that’s being acquired as part of an organised crime investigation focused on communications data. The old way really was about using multiple Excel tables, V look ups,  joining tables together, right?

Debbie Forster MBE:
You’re taking people back.

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Memory lane now.

Eddie Vaughan:
That’s really how we used to run these very significant national operations around terrorism and organised crime. What Chorus have done, they came to the market with a software solution that said, actually we can take all of that big data, we can take that communications data, we can cleanse that data, we can visualise it, we can enable you to analyse that data in order for you to be able to discover, link and solve and move faster and be more efficient in the investigation process.  So I’ve witnessed first-hand, I think, how Chorus has those benefits around enabling government and law enforcement and now banking and financial services to process big data.

Debbie Forster MBE:
It was fated. You began the journey of working for Chorus from your earliest career long before you even knew you’d be in tech.

Eddie Vaughan:
Kind of. Yeah.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah. I think it’s because it was about making the right tools. Instead of wrestling with spreadsheets, you were wrestling with an investigation and actually doing that day job. Whenever I’ve been interviewing people, I think what always comes clear, great products, great companies bring together the natural geeks who love to build stuff. But if you don’t have those really focused users that want to understand how to make it work, you’re going to have lopsided companies and services and bringing those together. So, bringing you in as a super user, as a product owner who really understands what this means in the field is essential for the success.

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. I think I wear multiple hats, but if I think back to previous roles around technology, I think Santander is probably a really good example there of how you can have those super users, the people that understand the technical elements of the solution, but we still need someone to interface with the business. My role’s a commercial role at Chorus, but I’m coordinating multiple different people to unite the vision there, but that domain product owner role is pretty critical.

If I think back to the days at Santander sitting within the future fraud team, so building the strategy around the systems and controls that we need as a bank, sitting between the business and the technical side to coordinate and drive change and translate that into a meaningful business and operational outcome rather than it just being a techie solution. Somebody needs to be able to sit between that and explain that. I think that’s probably where I’ve excelled is being able to bridge that gap between technology, product ownership, and translating that into commercial execution.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Because you learned it because I think again-

Eddie Vaughan:
Absolutely.

Debbie Forster MBE:
… as that survival skill, if you’re really… It’s passionate users that find their way into tech, I often find because they’ve learned the language, they’ve learned the how because they’re so passionate about the why. I think it’s for any tech leader to ensure when you’re building your teams to make sure you’ve got that combination of people. They all need to speak the same language, they need to be techie, but as you say that really understand that intersect for the business is crucial for success. That’s probably why Chorus was so keen to bring you through.

Now, I know you would’ve heard of it, several people, a lot of people on the podcast will know about Chorus Intelligence, but for the six people who don’t, can you just give me that quick whistle-stop tour of what is Chorus and then we’ll talk about why you came in?

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. Absolutely. Chorus isn’t a start-up, it isn’t a scale-up. The business has been well established and running since 2011. It has a preeminent position within UK government and law enforcement and now an emerging presence in the US, and we provide an industry leading end-to-end digital investigation software.

We talked about the history of Chorus and how it came to be, the exploitation of large data, the ability to analyse the data cleansing, to visualise and to discover, link and solve all of those different data points to solve organised criminality. We continue to do that. We’ve grown now to over 150 customers. We work with nearly all of the counter terrorism units, 80% of complex crime investigation units within law enforcement. Many UK central government agencies as well use our services. More recently, we’ve been engaged by a number of Tier 1 banks to help them solve some of those challenges around complex crime investigations.

Debbie Forster MBE:
That enter, Eddie, from stage right to work on that. Why is that happening now? Because for Chorus, if it has such long footprint, knowledge, presence in law enforcement and government, why financial services and why now?

Eddie Vaughan:
It’s a natural progression. I think if we look at where the market’s been over the past 10 years in terms of technology, and I’ve been part of that as well in the previous businesses that I’ve been involved in, there’s been a real focus on the adoption of real-time decisioning systems. Be that fraud, financial crime, those systems that are integrated into that real-time flow for things such as onboarding, ongoing screening, transactional monitoring, payment initiation. That’s not what Chorus does. Actually, when you look at that market, there’s a huge amount of vendors now that sit within there. If I was a buyer, I’d be looking at it thinking, crikey, which direction do I go here? Because everyone’s banging on my door saying I’ve got the latest real-time AI driven, card-not-present, fraud transactional system. For buyers, it’s a really difficult environment. I think what we’re going to see in that real-time space is a consolidation over the next two years.

That’s not what Chorus does, but the challenge there is we actually only detect less than 1% of dirty money. That’s a crazy statistic, isn’t it? We’ve got all of these real-time decisioning systems, and they are to all intents and purposes effective at identifying surface-layer fraud and financial crime, but they don’t enable you to go deep. Are we sacrificing that deepness and richness of intelligence analysis and development to be able to see organised criminality? Are we sacrificing that for speed? Potentially. Customer expectations is about speed now. We are not playing within that specific environment there. What we’re our organisations to do, particularly those with mature financial intelligence units, is where they have a suspicion of organised criminality be able to discover, link and solve that within the Chorus Intelligence Suite. Also, we’re seeing new regulation and the need to share information intelligence between financial services and law enforcement.

I wrote a blog actually a couple of days ago about what are those barriers to sharing? What processes do we have today? We know, particularly in finance, what we have is things like the SAR regime. Pretty suboptimal. A lot of over-reporting. I think with our pre-eminent position within law enforcement and now emerging footprint in financial services that we’re uniquely placed really to be that partner where we enable the real-time sharing of information between these different organisations. I think that’s really the future. How do we as an organisation or how do we as an industry move away from these well-known SAR data sharing information protocols that are legacy, but which everyone’s hesitant to move away from, which everyone over-reports? How do we share intelligence and information in the right way and we move it from day plus seven, day plus 10 to being more near real-time and sharing the right level of transactional level of information? I think that’s the opportunity there.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Yeah. I think those are three really important pillars that financial services are starting to grapple with. But I suspect that’s something a lot of industries are going to have to, a lot of the verticals are going to have to wake up and think about, that real-time or near real-time decision-making, insights, whatever we want to call it, versus the depth and then that manageable sharing because that movement across I think. It’ll be really interesting to watch how you adapt that for financial services. As you are working on this proof of concept, what are your key challenges and what are you keeping your eyes on for the prize in making sure this really works in moving into financial services?

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. We’ve been successful to date in banking and financial services. We’re currently working with two large UK banks, so we’ve proven the concept of deep-level investigation. I think the challenge for us at Chorus is to remain true to what we are. We are a digital investigation suite that enables the investigation of complex criminality. What we don’t want to do is to build another real-time decisioning platform, an orchestration platform. That’s not what we are. It’s not true to our very being and the journey that we’ve been on as a business over 15 years. We exist to enable those financial intelligence units to be more effective, to discover, link and solve where suspicions arise of serious and organised criminality.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I think that that’s a journey that is taking both you and your customers on. Because I think anytime a company or a product is moving into a new space, there’s that challenge because people will say they want something different, and yet they want something that looks and feels like what they’ve had before. It is always tempting when you’re moving into a new space, there’s death by, wouldn’t it be cool if? Or feature death. Right?

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Well, that’s great, but can we do… Keeping, like you say, true to where and not compromising on the key USP of what Chorus does and what the products are. Evolving, yes, to make it work for financial services, but not sacrificing that in moving into that new customer need space.

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. I agree. It’s about we don’t want to work with everyone. That sounds strange, right? Because everyone’s – I’ve got 100% of the addressable market, but actually the customers and the financial services organisations that we work with today are very different to many within the world in that our customers have an understanding of their financial client risks. They are mature in their outlook. They recognise that they have deep levels of organised criminality operating within their estate, and they need the tools in order to be able to investigate those.

We think about the overall picture, we still need those real-time decisioning systems, those systems that enable organisations to assess the behaviour of someone or something at application or at a transactional-level activity. That’s what our customers, our customers of the customer expect. Consumers expect a real time and seamless digital journey, but that isn’t the be all and end all of delivering an effective financial crime framework within a bank, particularly for those organisations whose operations are somewhat complex. Could be cross-border relationships, could be complex relationships, high risk, etc. There needs to be the tools that enable them to effectively identify serious and organised criminality alongside doing what we are doing today around real-time decisioning. We cannot sacrifice speed for the depthness and richness of investigation capability.

Debbie Forster MBE:
But it takes that strategic bravery, particularly early in a product journey. Like you say, this is not about owning the whole market, this is the right customers doing the right things in those early days. It’s not we’re going to crowd everyone else out of the market. Understanding the right customers for the right journey to develop it and not to panic when our customers are using other products. It’s and not or. It’s the make sure you know where your gold is, particularly in those early stages of the piece.

Couldn’t agree more. Super. Now, if I step back even further, you’re unique on the show on thinking about with your experience and knowledge. Let’s take a step back. What do you think the future collaboration between law enforcement, government, banking should look like and why?

Eddie Vaughan:
That’s an episode all in itself, I fear.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Give me the taster? Give me the high level-

Eddie Vaughan:
The taster. The taster.

Debbie Forster MBE:
… and leave the audience and me keen to get you back in.

Eddie Vaughan:
We have to acknowledge as an industry that the current mechanisms of information sharing through things such as SAR regime and other private partnerships aren’t working, and we have to forge a new way ahead. That’s going to be a painful way ahead. We have to recognise that over-reporting has existed for many, many years from financial institutions for fear of not having reported something. So we over-report, that’s a natural human behaviour. We have to move onto a more intelligent, intelligent sharing footprint and parity between government, law enforcement and financial services.

So for us at Chorus Intelligence, it’s about uniting the ability to share cases and expose the right level of investigative data that gives our intelligence and investigation partners the insight as to where we might have suspicions within the banks and then creating the mechanism through our Chorus Intelligence Suite in order to share that information right down to a transactional-level, if required, that enables our law enforcement partners to then analyse and take that information within their wider investigation. That process does exist today, but the process from start to finish of a law enforcement organisation requesting information from the bank can be anything between 15 and 50 days.

With the ability to do this in seconds with the right governance and information sharing protocols around it, those mechanisms are there today, but we are uniquely placed in order to move these organisations to a more parity of interoperability. I think that is the absolute future of where we’re going. There have been some really interesting examples of this. Only last year, the NCA, with six of the biggest UK banks, ran a project called I think Project Fusion, which is where they looked at sharing more transactional-level detail. We yet to see the full output of that. I have heard from my sources that it’s been broadly successful, but the fundamental issue will remain is how do we productionise that? But then if we only do it for those six largest banks, what’s that going to say to the criminals? Don’t launder your money through these six banks.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Pack your bags and move to the next neighbourhood. Yeah.

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. They’re hooked it up here directly and that information is being shared at the appropriate point in near-real time, but go somewhere else. We all know within crime pattern analysis, if you flood an area with resources, criminals are going to go somewhere else. It has to be one system that works for all that are regulated in the right way, that if we can build that mechanism and the mechanisms are there today in the Chorus Intelligent Suite to share information with law enforcement, it makes sense.

Debbie Forster MBE:
But all the great innovation, after the first breakthroughs, mean getting critical mass of people who can get past that fear of doing something scary and doing something outside their silos. But in doing it, then the net benefit for all. But it’s definitely something to watch. All right. We’ll keep an eye on that. Might get you back, Eddie, as we learn more about that.

All right. Well, we could talk about that for, as you say, a whole other episode. But as we come towards the end of the show, I do like to ask guests to step back for a moment. Look from just what is your day job, for the horizon of tech, asking what excites, scares, annoys them? What’s on the horizon for you, Eddie, that keeps grabbing your attention?

Eddie Vaughan:
Wow. Big question.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Big question. I’m all about the big questions, Eddie.

Eddie Vaughan:
Big, big questions on the show. I’m going to sound like a stuck record. I think we all recognise this is about AI and the application of AI, but I think in the world that Chorus Intelligence works in with law enforcement, with government, with banks is there are real sensitivities around how we embrace AI, particularly because we are custodians of very, very sensitive information. I see huge potential for AI. We continually see the amount of data per investigation significantly increase month and month and year-on-year. Therefore, AI has a real application in terms of helping our investigators and analysts to be able to see what matters, to be able to provide new and actionable lines of inquiry.

But ultimately, it must be explainable because we have such a critical position in the evidential chain. But I think from an intelligence development perspective across industry, AI for us deployed in the right way enables us to really start to see what matters and to give our investigators an additional leg up. We’ve been at the heart of innovation since the business started in 2011. We were first to market with the data cleansing and the analytics and the visualisation around communications data. This is a natural progression, but we’ve got to do it in the right way. You can’t start plugging open-source models in where there’s no governance and control, and all of a sudden that most sensitive of data, customer data, starts bleeding back into the ether.

Debbie Forster MBE:
That goes badly. Yeah. That’s to be avoided.

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. So everything that we do is responsible, and it needs to be governed, and it needs to be managed appropriately in the right way to deliver the right outcomes. AI for us isn’t about coding out analysts or investigators right. We’ve got robotic process automation businesses that do that. What this is about is enabling investigators and analysts, be they in law enforcement, government or banking, to see what matters. The more data we process, the more imperative it is we embrace the right level of AI tools to help that decisioning process.

Debbie Forster MBE:
And the right AI models. Even if we think about for 2025 what we didn’t necessarily think was going to happen this quickly is the rise of new models, whether it be coming from China, whether it’s coming from France. It’s both good and more challenging that we’re getting a more complex market to work with it this stage. I’m sure you’re keeping an eye on that too.

Eddie Vaughan:
Yeah. Absolutely. I think one of the most exciting things that we, without wanting to announce it now, but it will be coming out soon, is there is a partnership that Chorus Intelligence is going to do with a leading UK university who specialise in AI alongside a very large police force, and how are we going to deploy AI within the Course Intelligence suite to do exactly as we’ve just talked about. To be able to process and help decision huge amounts of data and provide actionable lines of inquiry. For us, it’s incredibly exciting, but it’s got to be done in the right way. It’s got to be governed, and it’s got to be managed, and it’s got to be controlled and ensure that the protection of data is critical in all of that.

Debbie Forster MBE:
I think those are four key factors. Obviously that’s of paramount intelligence when we’re thinking about investigations, crime, financial information. But again, again, I think it is something most sectors are going to have to grapple with because if they are really going to start using AI at some stage they’re going to start dipping into that more sensitive, that more fragile data. Those considerations have to come to the front. This is not just which is cheapest, fastest, sexiest? This is those ideas to think about. Completely agree. Again, something for us to keep an eye and look out for that project being announced and outcomes.

Okay. We’re just about done. I want to return to Eddie, the human. I love hearing from guests to see what they’re listening to, watching, reading that really fires the neurons for them. What is it for you? What are you listening to, watching or reading, Eddie, that’s really keeping you up?

Eddie Vaughan:
I’ve got three youngish children, so they’re keeping me incredibly busy with other types of reading. But if I do or when I do get the chance when I’m maybe on the tube or the train, I am listening to quite a well-known podcast within banking and financial services, financial crime domain. It’s called The Dark Money Files from a guy called Graham Barrow and Ray Blake. They have an incredible way of taking the audience through quite complex multi-million pound financial crime scandals in the banking system and explaining that in a way that’s actually quite easily understandable and quite digestible. I would absolutely advocate, if there’s anyone out there that really wants to understand how does dirty money really flow and what are the failings within the ecosystem, then certainly check out The Dark Money Files. It’s a great listen.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Okay. So, not Peppa Pig.

Eddie Vaughan:
Not Peppa Pig.

Debbie Forster MBE:
True crime for financial crime. All right.

Eddie Vaughan:
Absolutely.

Debbie Forster MBE:
That’s really, really interesting. Super. Okay. Listen, Eddie, this has been great. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of XTech. I’ve really love talking to you today.

Eddie Vaughan:
Thank you, Debbie. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Debbie Forster MBE:
Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at [email protected]. Finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to the XTech podcast.

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