Mama Money prevents fraud and scales onboarding with configurable, unified compliance

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, FinTech Mama Money is on a mission to make remittances affordable and accessible for foreign nationals across Africa. Founded in 2013 on the belief that sending money home should not come at the cost of financial security, the company offers cross-border remittances alongside banking, savings, and crypto products, all aimed at keeping its customers financially included.

With hundreds of thousands of customers transacting on its platform each month and money flowing to more than 60 countries, from Southeast Asia to Europe, compliance sits at the center of the business. For a company built on purpose as much as on financial services, trust is fundamental. When Mama Money’s previous compliance tools could no longer keep pace with its growth or its risk management needs, the team turned to ComplyAdvantage. Today, Mama Money uses ComplyAdvantage Mesh for customer screening and transaction monitoring in a single unified platform.

Serving communities, managing complex risk

Mama Money’s customers are largely foreign nationals sending money to family and loved ones in countries across Africa and beyond. The business carries risk across legal and compliance, reputation, customers, third parties, and finance, and manages each of these areas deliberately.

Each customer is risk-rated on their own transaction activity: where they send money, how much they send, and how often. With a fast-growing customer base and a product spanning multiple corridors, this creates a substantial compliance load. Because Mama Money channels resources back into the lives of the people who rely on it every day, a reliable compliance framework is what lets the company pursue that mission with confidence.

“Having peace of mind that we have a compliance tool that enables that makes a huge impact in customers’ lives, because that money that’s going could be the difference between life and death for a medical emergency.”

Mathieu Coquillon, Co-Founder and Director, Mama Money

Outgrowing a binary compliance tool

As Mama Money’s customer base and transaction volumes grew, its previous compliance tool stopped keeping pace. The system was binary. It could not be configured to reflect different risk profiles for different customer types, nor could it prevent fraud before it occurred. Without the ability to flag risk early, customers could be left exposed if fraud occurred.

Every rule change also depended on engineering. Because the previous tool could not be adjusted in-platform, each change required developer work, which became a bottleneck whenever the technology team had to weigh competing priorities. The lag between identifying a need and shipping a change started to hold the business back.

“Before the implementation, we were stuck using a lot of our development time and missing a lot of opportunities to scale.”

Mathieu Coquillon, Co-Founder and Director, Mama Money

There was also a hidden cost. The sanctions screening tool Mama Money needed to meet its regulatory obligations had to be purchased separately, adding both expense and complexity to the compliance stack.

A phased implementation built on collaboration

Mama Money set out to find a solution that could identify and prevent fraud at order creation, before it could affect a customer, and that would let its internal fraud team create and amend compliance rules without developer involvement.

ComplyAdvantage’s Mesh platform met those requirements. The rollout ran across three defined phases, each with its own milestones. Working alongside the ComplyAdvantage Customer Success and Technical teams, Mama Money reached outcomes it could not have achieved alone.

“Working with the Customer Success and Technical teams at ComplyAdvantage during the implementation process was great. Very productive, very collaborative, and we found it very seamless and easy.”

Mathieu Coquillon, Co-Founder and Director, Mama Money

One early proof point came through regulatory reporting. As a regulated entity, Mama Money must submit transaction monitoring reports to the South African Reserve Bank (SARB). 

“Previously, we were really struggling to meet our obligation with transaction monitoring and reporting to the Reserve Bank. With ComplyAdvantage, we’re now able to meet that obligation effectively, accurately, and in a timely manner, which helps with our relationship with our regulator, which is fundamental for our business.”

Mathieu Coquillon, Co-Founder and Director, Mama Money

Results: Fraud prevention, regulatory confidence, and room to scale

Since deploying ComplyAdvantage Mesh, Mama Money has seen measurable improvements across its compliance operations.

Mama Money can now identify fraud at the point of order creation and prevent it from happening, rather than discovering it after the fact. Customer screening runs in the same platform, with sanctions and watchlist data in a single unified view rather than a separately purchased tool. Each customer is risk-rated on where they send money, how much, and how often, with a dedicated risk-rating methodology, including geographical risk ratings, that lives directly in the platform. 

“ComplyAdvantage allows us to create our own rules and changes into the system directly, and our developers can carry on building products for our customers.”

Mathieu Coquillon, Co-Founder and Director, Mama Money

The reporting dashboards give the compliance team a strategic view of its operations and the ability to prioritize work, so analysts spend their time on genuine risk rather than administrative noise. The platform’s responsiveness also speeds up onboarding, letting the team review each customer individually against the documents and information they provide. ComplyAdvantage’s standing as an established compliance provider has reassured prospective partners weighing whether to work with Mama Money.

Growing with confidence

Mama Money has been in the trust business for over a decade, built on showing up for customers, understanding their pain points, and staying agile enough to fix problems as they arise. The team treats compliance infrastructure not as an obligation, but as a competitive advantage.

“Any opportunity we have on development time to build new products is critically important when we’re growing and scaling. Having the peace of mind that we now have this tool that no longer requires us to actually do development on our compliance changes, with ComplyAdvantage, we’ve been able to do that.”

Mathieu Coquillon, Co-Founder and Director, Mama Money

As the business expands and scales its customer base, the ability to create and amend compliance rules quickly, away from engineering dependencies, will be central to sustaining that growth.