Inpay uses advanced payment screening and transaction monitoring to drive rapid growth

Inpay is a cross-border payments company headquartered in Copenhagen, specializing in fast, low-cost international transactions. It supports over 90 currencies across multiple payment rails, including SEPA, SEPA Instant, and SWIFT. With an average payout time of under five minutes, Inpay enables real-time, 24/7 money transfers for businesses, financial institutions (FIs), and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). With a client base that includes small businesses and large enterprises, Inpay now completes over one million transactions a month. 

Inpay’s expansion has earned it recognition as one of Denmark’s fastest-growing companies and one of Europe’s most rapidly advancing FinTechs. However, this growth brought challenges that meant the company needed to re-evaluate its approach to compliance. 

The limits of building in-house

Inpay started out with an in-house compliance solution built when the company was founded. This solution was based on simplistic transaction thresholds. As the company gained more customers and processed more transactions, the limitations of this approach became clear. 

Continually altering payment screening and transaction monitoring parameters to cope with increasingly complex transactions created a huge strain on Inpay’s IT capabilities. A lack of flexibility in the existing system threatened to restrict further growth, with resources constantly diverted to make the necessary adjustments. 

“We came from an in-house solution that essentially took ten years to build. The moment we started having a larger inflow of transactions and more complex scenarios, we were limited in what we could design.”

Lukas Andersen, MLRO and Head of Financial Crime Risk, Inpay

Inpay decided to look for external vendors so they could remain a growing company and turn compliance from a drain on resources into a competitive advantage. 

ComplyAdvantage offers streamlined implementation 

Important criteria in Inpay’s search for a RegTech vendor were: 

• Accuracy and flexibility when screening and monitoring customers and transactions. 
• Comprehensive, customized data dashboards. 
• An intuitive user interface. 
• Maximum uptime during the implementation process. 
• Secure data handling. 
• Cost per transaction. 

As Inpay conducted its selection process, our platform came out on top in each of these categories, with the ability to adapt its service to Inpay’s needs being a crucial differentiator. 

Inpay needed its compliance solution to integrate with a complex proprietary payments system and approached the partnership with a list of requirements, scenarios, and intended outcomes. The company’s compliance team worked closely with us to tailor a solution that satisfied these, with our team providing additional scenarios to enhance Inpay’s coverage without compromising its control over its tech stack. 

Since implementation in 2017, our teams have continued to work together to optimize Inpay’s regulatory compliance, with regular check-ins and feedback allowing any changes to be made quickly. 

“What really set ComplyAdvantage apart from the competition was the ease of implementation and the service level. Even in the introductory meetings, it was clear that we would be listened to and that we could set the direction of what we wanted, but with really great feedback from the ComplyAdvantage implementation team.” 

Lukas Andersen, MLRO and Head of Financial Crime Risk, Inpay 

Enhanced flexibility makes the difference

Thanks to fully customizable screening and monitoring parameters, Inpay has been able to tailor financial crime controls to its evolving risk profile and appetite. As the company targets new industries and markets, Inpay can adapt to changing risks by creating nuanced rules for different customer segments and customizing search profiles for ongoing monitoring purposes. 

This ability to make changes with minimal disruption is informed by in-depth dashboards allowing Inpay’s compliance team to analyze its performance, with our team on hand to create additional reporting capabilities if any gaps emerge. 

Comprehensive data has also been instrumental in helping Inpay build strong relationships with regulators. Enhanced data points have strengthened its suspicious activity report (SAR) filings, while real-time customer data updates ensure compliance with evolving sanctions lists and regulatory requirements for instant payments and verification-of-payee capabilities.

Demonstrating the value of compliance 

Since partnering with us, Inpay has seen improvements across all areas of transaction screening and monitoring, from effective risk management to enhanced operational efficiency. Inpay’s most recent regulatory audit identified zero areas of non-compliance, testifying to the effectiveness of our solutions. 

“ComplyAdvantage has not only been able to reduce the number of false positives we see, but also the time we spend on each alert.”

Lukas Andersen, MLRO and Head of Financial Crime Risk, Inpay 

In addition to mitigating risks and avoiding regulatory action, our partnership has enabled Inpay to streamline its compliance workflows. With a data-driven understanding of how long certain scenarios take to resolve, Inpay has optimized its resource allocation and staff training to the point where it can handle thousands of alerts with a relatively small team of analysts. 

This means Inpay has been able both to achieve specific compliance outcomes and refine its wider strategy. Equipped with data on the time and money saved on alerts, the company’s compliance team can clearly demonstrate efficiency and value in discussions with key internal stakeholders, showing how investing in compliance can drive growth.

“If you’re evaluating whether you want to build or you want to buy, what’s easy to forget is the return on investment. Any business that needs a reliable but innovative solution that can adapt to the dynamic landscape of cross-border payments should consider ComplyAdvantage.”  

Lukas Andersen, MLRO and Head of Financial Crime Risk, Inpay