Highlights:
1. ComplyAdvantage raised approximately USD 50 million in funds to avert financial crimes.
2. ComplyAdvantage helps organizations to make intelligent choices when complying with regulations relating to terrorist financing, sanctions, and money laundering.
The digital banking sector is expanding at a rapid pace, thus creating a world of finance more accessible and transparent for individuals. But the flip side shows that digital banking has opened significant avenues for illegal movement to thrive, with approximately USD 2 trillion legalized yearly, but only 1–3% of that sum caught.
To cease the financial criminality, a London-based start-up ComplyAdvantage designed an artificial intelligence (AI) platform and a wide database of some 10 million entities to track and identify individuals or businesses involved in monetary corruption. Recently, ComplyAdvantage announced funding of USD 50 million to expand its reach and operations.
Funding will be used to invest in enhanced tools to detect financial criminals, to hire a well-trained workforce, and to get more clients.
Charles Delingpole, CEO & Founder of ComplyAdvantage, said, “We’ve been focused on more granular analysis and being able to scale to hundreds of millions of searches across our database.” Further, he added, “the next phase is more around the network of contacts and more enhanced diligence.” The company’s strength in the UK and Romania is about 250.
Series C is led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, a huge pension plan in Canada that is termed as a prolific growth-stage tech investor. As per PitchBook Data, the company has raised approximately USD 88 million. While it’s not revealing its valuation at the moment, it was last valued at about USD 141 million in its last round a year ago, as per another source.
Olivia Steedman, Senior Managing Director, TIP, at Ontario Teachers’, said, “ComplyAdvantage offers mission-critical technology solutions for combating financial crime and keeping pace with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape.” Further, Steedman added, “The company is well-positioned to continue its rapid growth as its powerful technology platform transforms the compliance and risk management process for its clients.”
Presently, ComplyAdvantage has about 500 clients, mainly financial institutions using it to meet regulatory compliance requirements as well as to reduce their exposure and risk. The company is expanding its business by grouping with other firms that are tracking fraud for their ends, for instance, insurance companies.
The major aim of the company is to help banks meet regulatory compliance around fraud detection by analyzing and ingesting documents submitted by consumers ahead of opening accounts, larger transactions with new entities, and others. At present, business is passed around a central database of known drug lords, money launderers, terrorists, human traffickers, and others who exploit financial rails to run illegal operations, thus making a profit from them.
Jan Hammer, a Partner at Index Ventures, said, “Detecting financial crime in billions of transactions that take place around the globe has become nearly impossible without the application of data science and machine learning.”
About ComplyAdvantage
ComplyAdvantage is a leading AI-driven AML data and technology provider. The company was founded in 2014 by Charles Delingpole with headquarters in New York and London. It is an award-winning AML data and technology supporting financial crime fighters.
The company has combined machine learning (ML) and AI with market expertise to enable businesses to customize a risk-based method to their compliance requirements.
Delingpole said, “Our solutions enable companies to improve how they onboard and monitor clients, screen payments and monitor transactions by reducing false positives and speeding up processes, all delivered by flexible, RESTful APIs.” This leading AI-driven AML data and technology provider operates globally, with about 350 firms in the financial industry and others operated in high-risk sectors.
