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Azimo improved AML risk management and reduced false positives

Adverse Media Payments Customer Stories

The Company

Azimo’s mission is to use technology to make financial services affordable and available to all by providing business owners and entrepreneurs with a cheaper, faster way to buy goods and services, pay staff and invest overseas.

Industry: Payments
Product: Screening and Ongoing Monitoring

The Challenge

Azimo was dissatisfied with their global data solutions provider and needed to find a more reliable solution for AML compliance. Their data provider’s API was often down, and the compliance team was never given advance warning, which meant that Azimo would discover issues themselves, often after the company had been exposed to AML risk. As a result, Azimo was forced to bypass the system and run thousands of manual AML checks, resulting in significant payment delays and customer dissatisfaction.

In addition to these challenges, the inability to whitelist and the limited capabilities of their one-way API produced a high number of false positives. This meant that the same sender/beneficiary would be flagged for the same false positives (incorrect hits) every time the person made a payment, despite there being no change in the underlying AML data supplied by the provider. This was frustrating for Azimo’s compliance team and hugely inefficient. More worrying, though, was the negative impact this had on the customer experience.

The ComplyAdvantage team is very helpful and their AML solution is reliable and robust. We use their product to screen all of our transactions against various watchlists, and the whitelisting capability via their API saves us lots of time which is definitely an important feature for us.

— Maja Chaińska, Head of Compliance

The Solution

Azimo used ComplyAdvantage’s Screening and Ongoing Monitoring solution to increase the speed with which they onboard new customers and improve their ongoing monitoring capabilities. ComplyAdvantage’s two-way RESTful API allows their compliance team to receive real-time automated alerts when there are changes in risk status. The platform has whitelisting capabilities, which their previous provider did not offer, allowing them to reduce the number of incorrect hits and focus their efforts on the entities that pose a risk to their business.

In addition, ComplyAdvantage’s Adverse Media solution provides richer insight into individuals and companies and saves time on manually searching for more information on the internet. The solution uses machine learning systems to process more than 10 million webpages every day and collects comprehensive and high-quality data. This allows their compliance team to receive automated real-time alerts if any of their customers feature in negative news.

The Outcome

Azimo can now screen and monitor customers against real-time global data of persons and companies, in an automated way, with all of the data consolidated into single risk profiles. Adverse media is identified in the native tongue and automatically matched to the entity, enabling Azimo’s compliance team to monitor changes in risk with speed and accuracy.

Azimo’s compliance team was given access at an individual user level to the case management tool on the platform. This allowed them to keep a detailed audit log, which then could serve as evidence to regulators that customer due diligence had been exercised.

ComplyAdvantage’s reliable customer support and transparent whitelisting capabilities and controls allowed Azimo to better manage their client risk through alert and false positive reduction.

Azimo can now screen and monitor against real-time global data of persons and companies.

Disclaimer: This is for general information only. The information presented does not constitute legal advice. ComplyAdvantage accepts no responsibility for any information contained herein and disclaims and excludes any liability in respect of the contents or for action taken based on this information.

Copyright © 2024 IVXS UK Limited (trading as ComplyAdvantage).