Nordic banks are getting ready for the future with robots replacing humans

20 per cent of susipicious activity is dealt with by algorithms at present while humans deal with 80 per cent. These banks want to reverse this position

The two biggest Nordic banks have both recently beefed up their compliance units significantly. Both say the extra headcount is temporary.

Nordea Bank Abp has hundreds of employees who scrutinize billions of transactions in order to catch anything that looks potentially criminal. It’s a costly, inefficient system that Mikael Bjertrup, head of the bank’s financial crime prevention unit, plans to change. Bjertrup says that about 20 per cent of suspicious alerts are currently closed by algorithms, based on machine learning, with the rest still being handled by humans. He wants to see those numbers reversed so that algorithms handle 80