The venture is named after the French painter Paul Signac, who helped invent pointillism, the technique of using small dots of color to form an image visible at a distance. Signac will be led by Colleen Graham, the Swiss bank’s head of compliance in the Americas, and Sean Hunter from Palantir.
Credit Suisse supervisory intelligence staff will join Signac, Warner said. They will follow up on alerts generated by Palantir’s software, and devise ever more elaborate ways to test the bank’s lines of defense against illicit activity.
The bank has already been running monthly tests with fake unauthorized trades, which have evolved from simple one-day events to three-week affairs, and employees know the tests are being conducted, keeping them on their toes, Warner said.
In April 2010, security researchers in Canada used Palantir’s software to crack a spy operation dubbed Shadow Network that had broken into the Indian Defense Ministry and infiltrated the Dalai Lama’s e-mail account.
Palantir was valued at $20 billion in a funding round in 2015, people familiar with the matter said at the time. That compares to a market capitalization of under $29 billion for Credit Suisse.
“By establishing this joint venture, Tidjane Thiam has demonstrated his vision, high integrity and depth of commitment to ensuring operational risk management at Credit Suisse,” Palantir Chief Executive Officer Alexander Karp said in an e-mailed statement.