RIP – Four eye check…we won’t miss you 

By Ryan McQueen

Implementing a new four-eye check sucks, and it feels icky like deciding to take your sibling to the high school prom. Yes, it is a path forward and better than staying at home, but at the end of the day you are disappointed in yourself for not taking a chance on a better option. Well, I want to propose a better option! 

Four-eye checks are a common practice in capital markets, where two people independently verify the accuracy and completeness of a task or a process. The purpose of these checks is to reduce the risk of human errors, which can have serious consequences in highly regulated industries. Errors can lead to large financial losses and penalties, negative reputational impacts, or even loss of trading activity.  

However, everyone knows four-eye checks are far from reliable. They are time-consuming, costly, and prone to inconsistencies. Reviewers have various levels of expertise, attention, and interpretation. Fatigue, stress, or bias also impact their attention to detail. Moreover, four-eye checks can become obsolete or ineffective when there are changes in the business environment, such as new regulations, products, or systems. These changes require constant training and updating of the reviewers, which can be challenging and expensive. 

This is where AI-First Solutions can replace four-eye checks with AI-Checks. AI can be the first pass to check to run consistently, more accurately, and more reliably than humans. Once trained on a new change, AI will execute the check correctly every time going forward, without the risk of incomplete training. AI also never tires, so it scales with business volume and complexity. 

AI enhances the role of reviewers, rather than replacing them. AI flags potential errors or anomalies that need further investigation and provides explanations and recommendations for the reviewers. This way, human reviewers can focus on what matters: taking action and fixing breaks.   

In conclusion, the era of human four-eye checks as a quality control in capital markets is over. AI-Checks can overcome their limitations and challenges and bring consistency, accuracy, and reliability that these regulated tasks require. Human reviewer effort should be focused on taking action and fixing breaks. Goodbye four-eye check, it was nice knowing you.