A new study by risk management software provider Actimize found that 53% of respondents "auto-close" suspicious activity alerts without properly investigating them, while a quarter of firms auto-close at least 26% of all alerts generated without any investigation at all.

These results come after a recent survey by the same company showed that 75% of investment firms fully expect another $100 million rogue trading loss to be uncovered at a large financial institution within the next 12 months.

Amir Orad, CMO at Actimize, says in his experience "even regulator-approved auto-close methodologies may negatively impact resources and productivity."

The survey also found that while most firms have one common investigative platform for fraud and anti-money laundering (AML), the majority of them separate responsibilities for both areas and do not share people between the two groups or have integrated investigation teams.

"It is likely that respondents' fraud and AML systems are siloed and generate a high number of false-positive alerts, and that firms do not have adequate resources or sufficient investigation tools to address all relevant alerts," Orad said.

Most respondents in the survey, which polled 161 executives responsible for anti-money laundering and risk management at financial institutions around the world, reported needing to access multiple siloed systems during investigations.

Over half of them said they depend on IT resources to build and run new AML and fraud reports. Orad suggests that IT-dependent firms either do not run the queries they would like to in a timely fashion, or use expensive internal resources to do so.

The survey also found that 55% of firms are not using integrated investigative tools capable of automated monitoring and cross-channel analytics, which can detect patterns across different databases and applications -- and potentially uncover sophisticated financial crimes.

But Orad suggests that no matter how integrated financial investigative units become, risk specialist roles must remain in anti-money laundering, fraud and legal across disparate regions and lines of business.

Meanwhile, Orad says research in the financial industry shows that small to mid-sized European firms have been among the first to change how they detect and investigate financial crimes.

Many have consolidated anti-money laundering and fraud detection into one "financial investigative unit," he says. This single group is responsible for monitoring all types of suspicious activities, whether initiated internally or externally.

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