“These banks have literally millions of email flying around a day. If you don’t have a system that can find the 0.001% instead of the 0.1%, the sheer number of alerts you have to deal with is overwhelming,” says Estes. “It required a quantum leap in cognitive review so you don’t have to spend 100-times the money in manual review,” he adds. Estes began pushing Digital Reasoning into finance in 2012 and now counts firms such as Goldman Sachs, UBS and billionaire Steven A. Cohen’s family office, Point72 Asset Management, as customers.
So, it sounds interesting doesn't it? Right? Think "Super Spy."
November 7, 2016
By Antoine
When Tim Estes, 37, created Digital Reasoning as a twenty-one year old with a philosophy degree from the University of Virginia, his startup aimed to use software to bridge mathematics with language and understand human behavior. Sixteen years on, Estes’ language-learning technology is used by a who’s who roster of Wall Street’s most scrutinized firms as they rein in employees and avoid the multi-billion dollar regulatory fines that have plagued the industry since the crisis.
Nashville-based Digital Reasoning, a new member of Forbes’ Fintech 50, was created with the premise that people build recognizable behavioral patterns using language and quantitative technology can be used to define these habits to understand corresponding action. Over time, the firm’s quantitative software teaches itself about patterns thus developing ever more-sophisticated models of individuals’ behavior, which can be used for surveillance ranging from counterintelligence to the combatting of fraud.
Estes’ bet has paid off. A few years after its founding in 2000, Digital Reasoning became an important cog utilized by the Department of Defense during the war in Afghanistan for communications surveillance aimed at gaining intelligence and protecting troops. Digital Reasoning was one of the successful startups that helped the Army comb through a haystack of digital information to spotlight counter terrorism intelligence, or uncover threats to troops on the battlefield.
Supposedly this really works to end the war in Afghanistan. Really?
In 2012, Estes decided to ply this surveillance to Wall Street amid the industry’s litany of billion-dollar fines for actions ranging from insider trading, to client fraud, and market manipulation. In a short period of time, Digital Reasoning’s Army-grade technology has become a staple inside the biggest banks and hedge funds in the world as they use big data and analytics to track employee communications and prevent against the next front-page scandal....
I guess Wells Fargo didn't buy it or use it enough to know the scams that was occurring.
So, there you have it. The frosting on the Edward Snowden cake.
