NICE Actimize, the compliance and anti-money-laundering software vendor, has announced the inauguration of its consulting and advisory division, eCAP, which will operate throughout the world.

NICE Actimize is at pains to emphasise that the new service draws on its decades of experience in working both with regulators and with financial institutions around the globe. It will help customer-banks evaluate all aspects (people, processes and technology) of their efforts to fight financial crime. The firm has written: "A NICE Actimize eCAP trusted advisor will identify inefficiencies and provide guidance to help reduce costs and improve the effectiveness of their existing programmes."

At the heart of this new division, which it calls a 'practice,' NICE Actimize is also introducing its Financial Crime Target Operating Model, which is designed to pinpoint the right objectives for a financial firm, create a meaningful list of technological objectives for it and establish a strong enterprise operational plan.

NICE Actimize has already used the eCAP Target Operating Model methodology to support numerous financial firms in their efforts to embed Big Data, artificial intelligence and Robotic Process Automation or RPA into their 'strategic roadmaps' that pertain to financial crime and compliance. In doing so it has found a niche in the market, as many firms are not efficient at taking on new IT. The Institute for Robotic Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence describes RPA as "the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a 'robot' to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems."

The software giant recently presented the market with X-Sight, a machine-learning "platform-as-a-service" designed to power the financial sector's first financial crime risk management marketplace. It claims that the service offers a single, unified, cost-effective way for firms to innovate rapidly and to introduce new services. The firm administers IT that tackles payment fraud, cybercrime, sanctions monitoring, market abuse, "customer due diligence" or CDD (in other words, "know your customer" or KYC controls) and insider dealing.