What you need to know:

• Rabobank’s Erica Van de Ven has revealed at this year's PegaWorld event how the bank is deeply embedding generative AI into financial crime prevention, transforming, not replacing, compliance roles.
• Machine learning, data platforms and Gen AI now handle workflows like onboarding, case management, and reporting, slashing admin while keeping compliance officers firmly in control.
• Calls are transcribed and summarised automatically, with anomalies flagged and reports pre-populated for faster, more consistent risk assessments.
• Responsible AI is baked in. Governance frameworks, dedicated AI officers, bias monitoring and drift detection underpin every deployment to ensure regulatory compliance and ethical AI use.
• Decentralised authority, agile squads, and hackathons empower junior staff to experiment, iterate and drive adoption, with board-level buy-in and quarterly business reviews.
• Faster decision-making improves customer onboarding and employee satisfaction while strengthening financial crime prevention capabilities.

Rather than replacing compliance officers, AI is reshaping their roles at Australia's Rabobank, accelerating decisions and strengthening governance  – all while improving customer and employee experience.

For global financial institutions, few challenges are as existential as financial crime. Rabobank knows this better than most. As a cooperative bank with 2.3 million members operating across multiple continents, known for its agricultural banking services in Australia, it faces the full force of fraud, money laundering, and terrorism financing. In 2023 alone, global fraud losses for the industry reached $486 billion, while money laundering hit $800 billion. In the Netherlands, ranked 12th globally on the secrecy index, the stakes are even higher. 

But according to Erica Van de Ven, Global Head of Financial Economic Crime Technology at Rabobank, the old playbook no longer works. Legacy point solutions, standalone systems, and armies of analysts performing manual reviews simply aren’t scalable.

"We ended up with 10% of the bank working in the area," she told delegates to the recent PegaWorld conference in Las Vegas. "That wasn’t sustainable at all."

AI-Augmented Compliance 

The bank’s response was to lean heavily into AI. Over the past two-and-a-half years, Rabobank has re-engineered its compliance stack, leveraging machine learning, advanced data platforms, and increasingly, generative AI to drive detection, prevention and workflow automation.

Instead of analysts having to copy/paste data and search across systems, the bank now has guided workflows, dashboards, and prioritised case management, Van de Ven explained. The result: Faster, more consistent decisions that keep compliance officers squarely in the loop, but vastly more effective at managing case loads.

Take onboarding reviews. Traditionally, compliance officers would conduct lengthy interviews with customers, manually document their findings, and input data into disparate systems. "In 2025, we're working on all kinds of summarisation cases. There's a lot of summarisation going on in the workflow. You can imagine that an analyst has to summarise previous cases of clients, or also summarise all the onboarding governance of clients, and that's a lot of work. So we're now working together with sata on making this gen AI use case work."

The ambition doesn’t stop there. Rabobank is experimenting with AI-generated draft reports, allowing compliance officers to focus their expertise on analysing risks rather than wrangling paperwork. “Imagine we can generate a report in the workflow with a broad conclusion made by GenAI, and the analyst can do what they’re good at: Assessing the risks and making the final decision,” she said.

Responsible AI in practice

The bank has embedded Responsible AI frameworks throughout its technology stack. Dedicated AI officers oversee governance, and teams operate under formal AI network protocols that ensure risk assessments, bias monitoring, and drift detection are part of every deployment.

“We make responsible AI building blocks, that what we call them,  so all teams can use it to test and monitor the risks of AI,  so is there no drifting and no bias? There's a dedicated AI officer in my team, and she takes care of how things are developing their machine learning or Gen AI skills,” Van de Ven said.

This structured governance allows the bank to balance speed with safety, a critical factor in a heavily regulated industry like banking

Much of Rabobank’s progress, Van de Ven argued, stems from cultural change as much as technical innovation. The bank has decentralised authority, empowered engineers, and embraced a scaled agile model where small, cross-functional teams experiment and iterate rapidly.

Rabo dares to give space to its people, she continued. Junior engineers and analysts, many of whom are early in their careers, are driving much of the GenAI adoption. Internal hackathons, innovation days, and challenge-driven sprints are common, fostering an environment where teams race to solve real-world problems like onboarding governance or case summarisation within 24 to 48 hours.

Even Rabobank’s leadership has bought into the experiment. Last year, the managing board tasked Van de Ven and her peers in retail and data to create an acceleration program specifically for Gen AI with quarterly reporting to monitor business outcomes. “They dared to commit, and they dared to invest,” she noted.

Financial Crime Prevention Meets CX

Crucially, these advances aren’t just improving compliance outcomes – they’re enhancing customer and employee experiences as well. Faster onboarding, quicker case resolution, and more consistent decision-making reduce friction for customers while freeing compliance officers from mind-numbing administrative tasks.

"They make it a human-centred transformation. They are very kids, very young people, actually, both engineers and analysts, and are very keen to do the AI adoption. We also have a culture of innovation and collaboration. The whole bank, all engineer teams are actually working agile scale.," Van de Ven said. 

The message out of Rabo is that far from eliminating compliance jobs, AI is reshaping them by augmenting human expertise with speed, scale, and precision. It’s also a clear signal that in financial services, governance and innovation no longer need to sit at opposite ends of the table.

As Van de Ven summed it up: "Dare to start small and scale fast. But care for your data, your people, and your Responsible AI."