Effective investigations are a critical part of any business. Whether it is the investigation of potential fraud or suspicious activity, enhanced due diligence when it comes to a customer request, or background checks as part of an application process, an effective and efficient investigative approach gives you the ability to move forward with confidence, taking action on activity that is potentially harmful to the business while quickly processing legitimate requests and transactions from loyal and high value customers.

Unfortunately, in today's landscape, it is becoming more and more challenging to efficiently conduct investigations. First and foremost, the volumes and variety of information generated and leveraged within the context of your business can be overwhelming. Much of that information is scattered inside and outside of your business and there is often a significant amount of unstructured content and documents. There is constantly new information coming in. Effectively managing all of this information and maintaining a complete, consistent view is extremely challenging.

In addition, the level of sophistication of your business activities and your customers and business partners (particularly those who wish to harm your business) continues to increase. Governments and regulatory agencies continue to push for increased visibility and accountability. Traditionally, investigations tend to be reactive -- occurring after the transaction in question has completed. Besides being extremely costly, reactive investigations have a much lower chance of positively impacting the business. Traditional investigative approaches tend to have the following issues:

• High operational costs
• Inefficiencies in coordinating investigations
• Limited visibility into the status of ongoing cases
• Heavy resources needed to collect and assimilate information required for the investigation
• Inability to prevent and detect similar events in the future
• Challenges in communicating investigation status or results to  external groups

IBM Intelligent Investigation Manager V2.1 offers your investigative teams a powerful solution for optimizing the investigations that drive your business. Investigators, analysts, supervisors, and case workers can collaborate in a single integrated environment, reviewing and contributing to the investigation as it moves through to completion. The investigation is driven forward using a combination of rules and process orchestration, which ensures that the case gets to the right person in a timely manner and key deadlines are met. All of the critical information for the case is presented in a consumable fashion to members of the investigative team and each participant is able to initiate new work as required, capturing the results of that work directly in the case. Analysts can conduct forensic analysis, discovery, generate leads, produce charts and visualizations, and contribute those directly back into the case. Case workers, such as auditors, field workers, or legal staff are notified of new work and are able to quickly complete their tasks, which enables the case to move forward. Supervisors have complete transparency into ongoing cases, enabling them to manage case load, assess business impact, and take actions as necessary.

Intelligent Investigation Manager V2.1 has cross-industry capability that can be applied within any industry to a wide variety of investigative use cases, including fraud, financial crimes, anti-money laundering, suspicious or criminal activity, tax evasion, background checks, enhanced due diligence, customer service, the review of applications or service requests, mergers and acquisitions, and others. Using Intelligent Investigation Manager, you will optimize those investigations, increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of your investigative teams, and generate more successful outcomes, not just for the investigations, but for your business as a whole.

Find out more here.