WorkFusion recently unveiled AI Agent Edward, a solution designed to revolutionise enhanced due diligence (EDD) at financial institutions. The company, known for its AI Agents in financial crime compliance, is now applying the same technology to one of the most resource-intensive areas of anti-money laundering (AML) programmes.
According to Workfusion, EDD has long been an expensive undertaking for banks and financial institutions, with nearly 25 years of heavy investment in people, processes and technology. WorkFusion’s new AI-driven approach aims to transform this, helping compliance teams identify and mitigate risks in high-risk customer groups more effectively.
Edward builds on WorkFusion’s AI Agent technology already in use across adverse media monitoring, sanctions screening alert review, Know Your Customer (KYC) checks and transaction monitoring investigations. By applying automation to EDD, financial institutions can achieve major efficiency gains while increasing the quality of risk reviews.
In his whitepaper, A Generational Shift in AML Compliance: How AI is Transforming Enhanced Due Diligence, WorkFusion head of financial crime compliance David Caruso highlighted the scope of potential improvements. Caruso noted that increasing EDD throughput by three to five times represents a major leap forward in effectiveness. He wrote, “EDD today, without AI, remains strikingly similar to the EDD of 2007 – with little change in the reliance on manual and repetitive work.”
Historically, EDD was a targeted activity applied to specific groups, such as correspondent banks and certain private banking accounts. However, its scope has expanded over time to cover a wide array of customer types, services and products. This expansion led to the creation of large teams performing repetitive tasks, but the reliance on manual processes has remained a challenge. Edward aims to change that.
By automating the data gathering, organisation and initial analysis, Edward reduces the manual effort involved in EDD by an estimated 40–60%. This shift enables institutions to process significantly more reviews while freeing analysts to concentrate on deeper, more complex assessments. The result is a faster and more consistent approach to managing high-risk clients.
Edward’s functions include accelerated data collection, automated organisation of information, transaction analysis, source of wealth and funds checks, and the creation of ready-to-use case dossiers. These capabilities feed into better-informed risk rating decisions while reducing administrative overhead.
Underlying Edward’s design is WorkFusion’s experience in applying artificial intelligence to compliance. The solution combines intelligent document processing (IDP), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI. Together, these technologies extract data from complex documents, flag anomalies in transaction patterns, summarise media reports, and generate concise investigative outputs.
A final advantage is consistency. Unlike human analysts, Edward does not tire of repetitive tasks. This reduces the risk of oversight and ensures that high-risk reviews are performed to a uniform standard across the institution.
By integrating Edward, financial institutions can expect not only stronger compliance but also measurable gains in efficiency and effectiveness in managing some of their most complex risks.
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