Global money laundering is 2 – 5% of global GDP annually or $800B – $2T. Laundering through financial institutions risks the integrity of the banking system and national security. ComplyAdvantage is the first global, connected database of people and companies, providing unprecedented insight into the risk level of who you’re doing business to reduce the risk of exposure to illicit activity. Mainly used by financial institutions seeking to meet regulatory compliance requirements and manage risk obligations, making them less vulnerable to financial crime. the solution replaces manual review processes like screening clients and monitoring client activity/transactions by leveraging machine learning. Currently, 10 million companies and individuals are in the database and ComplyAdvantage plans to expand the database to includes every person and company, a figure that will approximately total $8B.
London TechWatch caught up with CEO and Founder Charles Delingpole to learn more about how ComplyAdvantage fixes an obsolete compliance ecosystem, helping over 500+ clients fight financial crime, and the company’s latest funding round, which brings the total funding raised for ComplyAdvantage to $88.2M across three rounds.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We have raised $50M in a Series C funding round. The round was led by one of the largest pension plans in the world, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (Ontario Teachers’), Index Ventures, and Balderton Capital also participated in the round.
Tell us about the product or service ComplyAdvantage offers.
ComplyAdvantage shows you the real risk of who you’re doing business with using the world’s only dynamic global risk database of people and companies. Our suite of configurable cloud services integrates seamlessly into your workflow to automate regulatory processes and reduce the frustration of complying with Sanctions, AML, and CFT regulations.
What inspired the start of ComplyAdvantage?
ComplyAdvantage was born out of the frustration I experienced first-hand as the MLRO of a previous company. Despite using so many tools and solutions that supposedly fulfilled my responsibilities as an MLRO, they all had the same issues: being difficult to integrate, hard-to-use, and poor at providing relevant alerts. ‘False-positives’ impair the ability of compliance professionals from stopping financial crime and the activities it facilitates such as human trafficking and terrorism. The importance of addressing this issue ultimately led to me founding ComplyAdvantage in 2014.
How is ComplyAdvantage different?
Companies spend billions to understand the risk of doing business with their customers and other third parties, whilst complying with Sanctions and AML regulations. Legacy Software Solutions, generally speaking, are too expensive and inflexible to accommodate agile business models and risks.
ComplyAdvantage has taken a completely different approach to data intelligence through automated data accumulation and refinement to provide immediate insight into the risk of the person or company you’re dealing with. We have built a suite of plug-and-play configurable cloud services to fit seamlessly into your workflow and ecosystem that fit around other business models. Ultimately this boils down to reduced manual workload, e.g. typically reducing false positives by over 70% along with allowing faster remediation and investigation. Spotting risks faster by partnering with technology that incorporates sanction updates within 15 minutes and provides tens of thousands of updates to profiles daily.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We will continue to invest in our products. Our mission is to build the first global, connected database of people and companies powering world-leading financial crime detection tools.
You are seconds away from signing up for the hottest list in London Tech! Join the millions and keep up with the stories shaping entrepreneurship. Sign up today
