Congratulations to Celent's Model Risk Manager 2025 Award winners: Australia Post, Citizens Bank, DBS Bank, General Bank of Canada, First Technology Federal Credit Union, Nan Shan Life Insurance, and Ziraat Bank.
The 2025 Model Risk Manager Awards recognize financial institutions for best practices of technology usage in areas critical to success in risk management. With these awards we celebrate strong initiatives and offer examples to inspire industry transformation. We are excited to highlight collaborative efforts that have improved banks' competitiveness by mitigating risks, lowering costs, or improving customer products and experiences. We are at a watershed moment in technological advancement. In this moment, we see many institutions implementing or preparing to implement AI and generative AI functionality and automation in their risk systems. These benefits will only keep growing. This is an exciting time for risk technology at financial institutions!
Detailed case studies and video interviews on the winning initiatives are available as noted below.
Model Risk Manager of the Year 2025 Award Winner: Citizens Bank—Fraud Platform Transformation
Category: Fighting Fraud
Synopsis: As fraud spiked during the pandemic, it became apparent that the approach to fraud controls had to be reviewed and enhanced. Citizens Bank embarked on a multi-dimensional transformation journey covering data management, fraud models, and operational platforms. The bank opted for an in-house build for its fraud detection system, allowing for greater flexibility and customization to meet the unique needs of its customer base. The new fraud platform went live in October 2024 after 18 months of technology planning, design, and development. Key metrics are outperforming the targets set by the bank at the beginning of the transformation journey.
Case Study, Videos and 1-pager
Winner: Australia Post—Financial Crime Compliance Transformation
Category: Anti-Money Laundering
Synopsis: As part of its evolution from traditional postal services to digital banking and financial services, Australia Post implemented new AML systems and controls. It deployed Napier AI’s Continuum platform in the Microsoft Azure cloud, integrating transaction monitoring, client screening, and behavioral analytics across the organization. Australia Post is leveraging the system’s real-time capabilities to enhance financial crime detection. In terms of societal impact, this enabled AusPost to provide timely suspicious activity information that helped law enforcement dismantle a cross-country money laundering syndicate.
Case Study, Videos and 1-pager
Winner: DBS Bank—Responsible AI and Data Use Framework
Category: AI and GenAI
Synopsis: DBS Bank developed its Responsible Data Use (RDU) Framework to support data and AI governance. The framework has been applied to over 800 AI/machine learning models. DBS has now extended its AI governance framework to cover generative AI and in the last year DBS used it to roll out more than 20 GenAI use cases across the bank.
Case Study, Videos and 1-pager
Winner: First Technology Federal Credit Union—Safeguarding Members through AI and Machine Learning
Category: Fighting Fraud
Synopsis: First Tech faced challenges in fraud prevention due to outdated systems colliding with growing fraud threats. To address these, First Tech implemented Featurespace’s ARIC Risk Hub solution, which offers advanced machine learning, real-time detection, and cloud-based deployment. The platform enables best-in-class fraud detection while balancing security with a seamless member experience.
Winner: General Bank of Canada—Model Risk Management as a Service
Category: AI and GenAI
Synopsis: General Bank of Canada is a fast-growing bank that prioritizes an “AI-first” strategy to support risk management as well as the business through the use of strategic AI models. Required by regulation to implement a model risk management capability, GBC decided to use an innovative, SaaS-based solution from ValidMind. The platform enabled 90% cost savings compared to initial projections for traditional approaches and a 70% reduction in model validation time versus baseline estimates.
Case Study, Videos and 1-pager
Winner: Nan Shan Life—GenAI Sanctions Investigation
Category: AI and GenAI
Synopsis: Nan Shan Life Insurance developed a GenAI-powered sanction search system to automate compliance reviews of over a decade’s worth of non-digitized records of past sanctions that its local regulator has issued to insurance companies. Previously, this process required three staff members to spend two to three days per topic, across 50–100 topics annually. By integrating generative AI, OCR, and dynamic prompt injection, the new system now finds relevant sanctions in minutes with 90% precision.
Winner: Ziraat Bank—Control Robot Project
Category: Operational Resilience
Synopsis: Ziraat Bank has only 70 internal controllers overseeing compliance for 1,750 branches. Relying on manual processes for reviewing controls at these branches put the bank at risk of falling short on regulatory requirements. To solve this, Ziraat turned to RPA to automate their control review process across all branches, with no manual review needed.Ziraat Bank chose RPA over glitzier technological solutions for its operational reliability, ease of system integration, and regulatory transparency.
