Sentinels fights financial crime with new transaction monitoring progam

Intelligent transaction monitoring and client risk management specialist Sentinels has announced the launch of its new platform solution for transaction monitoring.

The SaaS platform is designed to help financial institutions detect and eliminate financial criminality with greater speed and accuracy.

In a market characterised by rising transaction volumes, spiralling compliance costs and ever-tightening regulations, Sentinels helps banks, wallets, payment service providers and other financial institutions get ahead of the AML curve. Users of Sentinels' solutions have realised up to a 55% reduction in time spent on case management and a 25% reduction in red herring false-positive transaction alerts, which needlessly divert the time and energies of compliance officers while increasing the chances of genuinely illegal activities slipping through undetected.

Sentinels has transitioned to a scalable, high-performance AWS cloud-based delivery model, where customers connect into the SaaS platform via secure, standardised APIs. This enables Sentinels to maintain a high pace of product innovation and development and to rollout continuous enhancements without disrupting client operations. 

The dynamically scalable computing capacity enabled by AWS also allows Sentinels' users to create and run powerful, data-heavy business rules in real-time, with consistent accuracy, allowing them to detect and react instantaneously to potential suspicious and criminal activity.

"One of the key challenges facing todays compliance teams lies in their limited capacity to identify, monitor and manage key sources of risk," says Christian Roberts, Chief Product Officer, Sentinels. 

"The Sentinels SaaS platform extends this capacity significantly, by enabling them to create and test tailor-made business rules without interrupting the platforms real-time detection engine," he says. 

"It also opens the door to the introduction of AI and machine learning algorithms which can further reduce risk by, for example, analysing patterns and suggesting enhancements. 

"This is an important step forward in our transaction monitoring capability and were extremely excited to bring it to market."

Ibrahim En-nali, Chief Technical Officer, Sentinels adds, "Our real-time detection capability helps our customers tackle more areas of financial risk by providing immediate analysis of transaction processing flows. 

"This enables our customers to proactively block suspicious transactions before they create further risks," he says. 

"The scalability of our SaaS architecture enables Sentinels clients to grow their transaction volumes unimpeded by the technologies they use to monitor, manage and mitigate risk."

Maria Adele Di Comite, Research Director, IDC Financial Insights Corporate and Retail Banking, says banks are in a privileged position to contribute to the societal good by combatting financial crime. 

"Regulators are therefore asking for support from the banking community and are imposing huge fines on organisations that are not complying with the requirements to combat financial crime," she says. 

"Banks efforts are twofold, they must contribute to detecting and combating financial crime, whilst meeting customers expectations for a seamless customer experience, thus they need to detect possible criminal transactions in the most efficient way deploying quick and smooth detection tools and processes. 

"That is the underlying reason that led 33% of the European banks to plan additional investments in AI and ML in 2022, implementing efficient automated screening processes, minimising the friction in customer experience, and enhancing operational efficiency by reducing false positives," Di Comite says. 

"The relevance of AI and ML, along with data and analytics investments are expected to grow in 2023 to address the ever-increasing concerns for security, risk, and compliance."

In just three years, Sentinels has grown from serving one customer - leading Dutch PSP, Mollie - to 25+ financial institutions across Europe, including Brand New Day, Paystrax, kevin, Ping Payments, B4B Payments and Rebellion Pay.

The new transaction monitoring platform from Sentinels is available now to customers across Europe.