Enthusiasts of space exploration will be familiar with NASA’s infamous Mariner 1 space probe. Launched in 1962 to great fanfare, within five minutes it had veered off course and had to be destroyed. $80m (quite literally) went up in smoke. The incident investigation later revealed that a single mathematical symbol had been misunderstood by a software developer. This typo led to a navigation error and what science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke termed ‘the most expensive hyphen in history.’

My takeaway from this saga? Security is a weak-link game.

Fortunately, in the aerospace industry at least, we’ve moved on from making aircrafts work to making them safe. However, in lots of organizations, software engineering still has to catch up. As engineers, we need to pay attention to the details to make sure that we catch the ‘typos’. But we also need to take a deeper approach to defense because we know attackers will find and exploit any mistakes we make.

At ComplyAdvantage, we recognize that it’s not enough to have perimeter firewalls, anti-virus and regular penetration tests – although we have implemented all of this. We need to engage in security (and privacy) by design. The first step towards achieving this is to understand the evolving threat environment we’re facing – this includes our attackers’ motivations and capabilities. We can then build security in, from the ground up, to meet these challenges.

As a relatively young company, we benefit from not having to nurse legacy software that was built in a much less complex risk environment. Our software is built to address today’s threats. It has multiple layers of protection, it’s cloud-native, and runs largely in ephemeral, short-lived containers that are regularly recycled and updated, making them harder to attack.

There are a raft of automated measures in place to verify the security of our platform, from code analysis tools and gizmos that check for insecure 3rd party components to various flavors of vulnerability scanners. But you can’t simply automate your way to security. So we provide security training for our engineers, we’re recruiting more security specialists (if you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you) and we’re continually assessing how we can improve our processes.

Despite the relative youth of our rocketship company, we’re big and successful enough to have a mature approach to security – but it’s not enough for us to just say all of this. So as well as penetration testing carried out by CREST registered external testers, we have qualified third-party auditors to check up on us regularly. We’re certified to the international standard for information security, ISO 27001, and we’re looking forward to gaining additional credentials as a demonstration of our continued commitment to keeping our customers’ data safe and our service the best on the market.

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We spoke to Charles Delingpole, founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage, to explore what the Series C extension means for our business, customers, and the fight against financial crime. 

In a sentence, tell us what ComplyAdvantage does.

ComplyAdvantage is the leader in AI-driven financial crime risk data and detection technology, using the world’s only dynamic global risk database of people and companies. 

Why did Goldman Sachs invest in ComplyAdvantage? 

Goldman Sachs shares our diagnosis that tackling financial crime requires AI-driven solutions like those we are providing to more than 500 enterprises in 75 countries already.

Our customer base also includes companies in the Goldman Sachs growth portfolio, which means they’ve seen first-hand how our products can detect money-laundering and related financial crimes, keep compliance teams well informed of rapid regulatory changes, all while reducing operational costs. 

Why are you excited about this investment?

Goldman Sachs is a leading global financial institution, so our partnership represents a fantastic endorsement of our brand. 

I’m looking forward to deepening our relationship with Goldman Sachs and its network, so we can help more companies deliver both growth and business integrity. A core part of our mission is ensuring customers don’t have to choose between the two. 

How will this investment be used?

As our company continues to grow, it’s getting bigger and more complex. That means we need to hire more world class talent capable of managing and scaling our world class software and data.

We’ve made a number of critical executive hires recently, so we’ll be looking to build on this momentum globally at all levels. We’re working to find leaders in their field who can work quickly and independently to build our products and support customers.

One example of this is our plan to hire another 80 engineers in the next 9 months. Ensuring our technology remains at the cutting edge of risk detection requires a sustained, relentless focus on our engineering and product capabilities. 

Why are the solutions ComplyAdvantage offers the future of financial crime and risk detection?

Our hyper-scale anti-money laundering and risk detection solutions do more than just deter financial crime. We’re proud to champion innovation in financial services because it is critical to massive business transformation.

As a result, we see our products helping customers achieve 3 key things: 

• Future proof their operations: Our data is always current, so our customers can access the latest risk and financial crime insights.
• Scale with integrity: Reducing manual effort and obtaining accurate results faster means lower costs.
• Drive limitless growth: Disruption and opportunity don’t have to be constraints. We help our customers to drive limitless growth by leading from the front. 

Finally, what message do you have for prospective customers and employees who want to get in touch?

Please reach out! We’d love to start a conversation with you. Here’s how: 

• If you’re looking to see what our solution can do for your company, you can request a demo.
• We also have a fantastic partner program, so if you’re interested in offering ComplyAdvantage to your clients, get in touch. 
• If you want to join us, we’re actively recruiting for a number of roles across our sites in London, Cluj and New York. Check out our latest vacancies and submit your application.

The post ‘Goldman Sachs wants to work with us to eliminate financial crime around the world’ – Q&A with Charles Delingpole appeared first on ComplyAdvantage.

But not all businesses have the resources and expertise to protect themselves. Early-stage startups, in particular, are vulnerable to overlooking the nuances of compliance requirements.

To address this issue, ComplyAdvantage launched its ComplyLaunch™ program. The goal: to provide qualified startups with free access to the tools and resources they need to manage AML/CFT risks and compliance requirements. 

The response has been tremendous with the first cohort of startups having signed up in just a few days. The program has also garnered the support of world-class organizations, including Seccl, a technology platform providing custody for financial services firms looking to safeguard their clients’ assets. ComplyAdvantage recently sat down with Dan Marsh, the Head of Customer at Seccl, to discuss why AML/CFT compliance is vital and how ComplyAdvantage’s new program can help.

Let’s start with a bit of context. Please tell us what Seccl is and what high-level market opportunity your company is innovating for.

Seccl is a platform technology business. We provide investment services to companies across the UK who want to make financial markets accessible for their customers. We spent the last five years building the infrastructure that sits behind global financial markets to allow easy plug-and-play access for retail consumers to trade, invest and save for their futures.

A program like this is powerful for startups because it will protect the business before they know they need to be protected.

Daniel Marsh, Head of Customer, Seccl

Who are your customers? What solutions have you developed to help your customers innovate or grow their businesses?

Our customers typically fall into two camps. We serve professional financial services providers — referred to in the UK as wealth managers or financial advisors. Those individuals build deep, long-lasting relationships with individuals and couples across the UK, helping them navigate the complexities of financial life.

They might offer recommendations as to what individuals should do with their money, such as opening specific tax products or investing in a certain way to meet specific goals, whether that be sending a grandchild to school, helping kids get through university, helping someone get their foot on the property ladder or, probably the most common, helping to provide for a comfortable retirement.

The other customers we serve are at the other end of the spectrum. We serve businesses that want to embrace the force multiplier of technology to democratize access to financial markets. Typically, we would view these as wealthtech or fintech businesses, and the principal problem they’re trying to solve is that markets have traditionally had a relatively high barrier to entry. You’ve got to have a certain amount of wealth to make it worth it. You’ve got to have a certain amount of cash to invest; otherwise, the fees and so on will work against you.

Our biggest innovation, I think, was consolidating those two markets and realizing that both are served by a highly efficient digital experience, one where there is a high level of security for the underlying assets and transparency around what is happening in the platform. Most crucially, we offer a series of open APIs to allow users to connect and work from within their own domains. Instead of building a separate app that you have to log in to, which is super clunky, you can drive the activity straight from the experience that your customers already know and love.

That is brilliant. Is your company one that could be directly or indirectly impacted by money laundering and related financial crimes? If so, could you tell us why?

Yes, very seriously. At the end of the day, we receive money from clients. So when we look at financial crime, we look at several areas. 

First, we need to make sure the individuals that use our customers’ services and place their money with us are people we want to do business with. That is, we need to make sure they are who they say they are and that they’re not someone who has perhaps committed crimes of a certain nature abroad and who we don’t want exposure to from a business risk perspective.

Second, we look at how people use our system. Our system, as a custody and trading system, works with clients’ money. When you look at crimes from a money laundering perspective, the activities we watch for include placement and layering. Although the activity may occur outside our system, the impact is felt within our system.

So it’s critical that every firm we work with, firstly, has a rigorous process in place. Secondly, it’s important to have a deep bond of trust between both businesses because, ultimately, the only way you can protect yourself is to align yourself with partners who think like you do. As long as you’re both consumed by making sure that you’re doing the right thing by your customers while keeping them and yourself safe, you’ve got a really strong platform for growth for both businesses.

What motivated your team to join the ComplyLaunch program?

There’s the obvious: the value it brings to our customers. But that’s not, in my opinion, where it starts. When you want to build a partnership with any organization, what you’re looking at is: do we think the same way?

ComplyAdvantage’s focus, in my experience, has always been on enabling entrepreneurs to be successful. By nature, every one of our customers is entrepreneurial, so the fit probably couldn’t be better. On top of that, the program is clearly very compelling for firms in that it helps get them over some of the fixed costs that can sometimes act as a barrier.

Why do you think it’s important for startups to have free access to programs like ComplyLaunch?

If we look at it as a society, the idea that barriers to entry stifle innovation is a broad-brush answer. The more access that can occur at lower fixed initial costs — for example, the free program you’re launching — the greater the number of people who can bring new ideas to the market. Those new ideas will generate innovation, and those innovations will generate societal and customer benefits.

In terms of the firms themselves, it’s really important because when you’re working for a new startup, you’re making a choice, and that choice is always: what do I do with this pound that I’ve got here? You will do or die by a few key parts.

Protecting your business is critical, but it’s also easy to under-invest in it because it’s not sexy. It won’t help you with your growth metrics when you go and sit in front of that VC. It won’t help you socially sell to your friends. It is often something that doesn’t get thought about until the business is quite successful and in quite a lot of trouble.

A program like this is powerful for startups because it will protect the business before they know they need to be protected.

What advice would you give founders who are thinking about building a new fintech or financial service offering?

First, to be bold. There’s so much innovation in the markets that if you follow the trajectory everyone else follows, you’ll get the same outcome, and your ability to innovate will be marginal — maybe you’ll see a 10% or 20% improvement. Boldness in terms of what you’re prepared to change will have a force multiplier effect for you immediately but also over time.

Second, and this goes back to something we talked about before, it’s about trust. You want to work with a partner that thinks like you do because it’s very, very hard as a startup founder, or for any business unless you’re very mature, to anticipate all 10 of the 10 issues that will come your way.

You’ll probably only know about two of them. If the other partner doesn’t think like you, when the other eight come up, it’s going to be your problem. So you’re looking for someone who makes those eight problems a shared problem, because a problem shared is a problem halved; then a problem halved, that’s a problem solved. Ultimately, those partnerships and the trust that you build are probably more important than almost any other ingredient that you can pour into your startup early on.

Any last thoughts that you want to share?

We get very excited here at Seccl when we hear about programs such as this one because it’s very, very rare in the market to offer something with no strings attached. It almost always comes with a catch and then a follow-on. But what is interesting here is that this is about driving innovation. It’s about increasing access to financial markets, which, for our customers, is incredibly important. So this isn’t one of those opportunities you want to spend the next three months working out whether or not you want to do it. If you think there’s a fit, just get stuck in.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Learn more about the ComplyLaunch™ program and how you can get involved by clicking here.

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For a memorable fireworks night, we were at The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 Awards for 2019. We were honored and humbled to win the Digital Innovation Award sponsored by Hiscox. It was also a pleasant surprise to be nominated for The Best use of IP presented by N+1 Singer.

We were also shortlisted for the Deloitte 2019 UK Technology Fast 50, coming 21st thanks to our +1500% growth.

Awards are a welcome reminder of the incredible work our team does every day at ComplyAdvantage, but they’re not the reason why we do what we do.

Why We’re Here

ComplyAdvantage was started because of the unending stream of problems faced by financial institutions in meeting regulatory requirements. After the financial crisis, regulatory upkeep for banks was like learning to swim with your hands tied together. Ineffective at best.

The wave of digital transformation narratives have spoken a lot about how to change the journey of the customer and bringing innovation to finance, but they rarely cover the pressing issue of regulatory change.

Our founder recognized that the technology already existed for businesses to adapt to incoming regulatory changes and turn regulatory pressure into a thing of the past. To do that ComplyAdvantage has focused on making products to tackle financial crime.

But these products aren’t what sits at the heart of ComplyAdvantage. They’re the result of our vision to take on and neutralize the risk of money laundering, terrorist financing, corruption and all other global financial crimes.

Five Years of Hard Work

For the past five years, that’s what we’ve been hard at work developing. Creating bespoke rulesets that are data agnostic and capable of catching transaction behavior that your business finds suspicious.

Permitting ongoing monitoring of your clients that’s automated, alerting your compliance teams when necessary and tailored to your business requirements.

Compiling an Adverse Information and Media tool that scans millions of articles per day without requiring your compliance officers to use a search engine. And sanctions screening that updates before regulatory bodies are able to send out their emails.

We know this is a huge goal which will take everything we have to make it a reality, so we made it our mission to build the first global, connected database of people and companies powering world-leading financial crime detection tools.

These awards and accolades are fantastic and they mean so much to us as the industry recognizes what we’ve done. But it’s the work that we’re focused on and we’re already working on the next steps to equip businesses with the tools they need to make financial crime a thing of the past.

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Congratulations to our client Santander for winning “Best Innovation in Product or Service Design for Corporate Digital Onboarding” –  we’re humbled and proud that our data and technology is part of your award-winning product.

Santander and its partners have introduced a fully automated SME and corporate customer onboarding experience, using consolidated dynamic form functionality covering a wide range of banking products, combined with APIs so that due diligence can be completed accurately, first time and in one go. It includes KYB and KYC screening processes prior to initiating customer-facing onboarding activities. It eliminates duplication and includes a counter-signing process believed to be a UK first.

About London Institute of Banking & Finance

The London Institute of Banking & Finance works to advance banking and finance by providing outstanding education and thinking, tailored to the needs of business, individuals, and society.

At the heart of the sector since 1879, they create connections and build partnerships between people and business that make banking and finance more accessible and understood, and enhance social inclusion through better financial capability.

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“Remittance firms provide a vital service that makes a huge difference to the lives of some of the world’s least fortunate people. Reducing the cost and increasing the availability of remittances whilst ensuring that money does not end up in the hands of terrorists are extremely important tasks. As such, we are extremely proud that ComplyAdvantage’s innovations are recognised and these remittance payments are thus made possible.” – Charles Delingpole, CEO & Founder, ComplyAdvantage

Helping remittance companies safely move money is at the heart of ComplyAdvantage’s story. Our first clients back in 2014 included Somali MSBs who were faced with the threat of de-risking. Today, we use AI-driven risk data and innovative technology to help global remittance firms automate AML/CTF programs, reduce false positives and stay compliant while giving their banking partners the confidence that illicit finance isn’t slipping through the net undetected.

We specialise in helping global Remittance firms:

• Spot risks more effectively with richer, comprehensive and up-to-date financial crime risk data from structured and unstructured sources
• Reduce unnecessary false positives by up to 70% with a tailored and fully risk-based approach
• Maximise straight through processing whilst staying compliant
• Exceed regulator and banking counterparty expectations
• Improve efficiency by reducing time-intensive manual work and automating low-level decisions

This means our remittance clients can onboard customers faster, clear funds in minutes and provide a seamless customer experience – allowing them to focus on scaling their business without having to scale their compliance team and, more importantly, avoid doing business with people connected to financial crime.

We would like to congratulate the other award winners Safaricom, Trulioo, EcoCashDisapora, MONEYTIS, AirPocket, Xoom, Bitso, Everex and TransferTo all of whom provide best in class solutions for remittance providers. A special congratulations must be given to our clients Azimo who won the Judges Choices award for Ease of Use and Adoption.

We look forward to the next RemTech awards in 2019 and to seeing how this exciting industry has evolved, improving financial services for those worldwide who rely on remittances everyday.

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