PayNearMe cuts transaction monitoring remediation times by 50 percent with ComplyAdvantage

PayNearMe is a payments platform that uses innovative technology to simplify customer transactions for thousands of companies. Headquartered in the US, its solutions let businesses’ customers choose how, when, and where they want to pay, streamlining the end-to-end process and minimizing the cost of payment acceptance. 

PayNearMe offers multiple payment methods, including cards, cash, mobile, and automated clearing house (ACH) payments. Through these channels, the company is inherently exposed to high levels of financial crime risk, including money laundering and fraud. 

Accurate and efficient transaction monitoring is therefore crucial in allowing the company to mitigate these risks while processing payments at scale. 

Manual transaction monitoring creates delays and compliance gaps

However, before partnering with ComplyAdvantage, PayNearMe relied on a manual transaction monitoring process. Transactions were added individually to an Excel spreadsheet, which compliance analysts had to review line by line for any signs of suspicious behavior. 

Unfortunately, this approach led PayNearMe’s compliance team to waste large amounts of time reviewing legitimate transactions. At the same time, it led to missed financial crime red flags due to increased human error and an inconsistent application of internal risk rules. Although PayNearMe was using advanced cloud software to solve the limitations of legacy payment technology, it was lacking a similarly forward-thinking approach to its own compliance setup. 

Accuracy, efficiency, and scalability separate ComplyAdvantage from the crowd

These compliance weaknesses led PayNearMe to switch to a data-driven approach revolving around automated transaction monitoring and stronger rules based on the company’s risk appetite and profile.  

When searching for an appropriate solution, PayNearMe assessed vendors against a list of essential criteria: 

• Automation capabilities: To improve the productivity of its compliance team while saving on resources, PayNearMe needed a solution that leveraged technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate repetitive and low-risk compliance tasks. 
• Accuracy: With manual transaction monitoring increasing the risk of illegitimate payments going undetected, improved accuracy in recognizing and escalating suspicious transactions was a key indicator of success for PayNearMe. 
• Efficiency: While increased accuracy was vital, this could not come at the cost of a high false positive rate, which would drain compliance resources and cause friction in customer experiences.  
• Scalability: Anticipating significant growth, PayNearMe needed a compliance solution that could scale with it and accelerate this growth. 

These features led the company to ComplyAdvantage, which was able to fulfill all of these requirements through: 

• Proprietary risk data: PayNearMe benefited from our out-of-the-box rules library based on industry-leading proprietary risk data. With our no-code, self-serve rules builder, it could also easily synthesize its risk insights with ours for maximum coverage. 
• AI and ML capabilities: Where existing rules are not able to detect specific activity, our ML systems step in to fill the gaps. Our transaction monitoring software also uses ML to identify hidden links between customer accounts through in-depth data analysis. 
• API-first integration: Flexible, low-latency integration and scalability to billions of transactions allowed PayNearMe to implement and adjust our solution with minimal downtime. 

“What we were looking for was a way to automate the ability to flag a transaction based on our internal risk rules and methodologies. That’s where we found ComplyAdvantage.” 

Connor McNulty, Vice President of Legal and Chief Compliance Officer, PayNearMe 

Teams collaborate to fine-tune rules

For successful payments firms, transaction monitoring is never static, with solutions needing to evolve to cover more and more transactions. PayNearMe’s ability to refine its transaction monitoring rules as it grew was crucial, both during and beyond implementation. 

Senior compliance staff at PayNearMe were impressed with the ability to easily do this on the ComplyAdvantage platform, as teams from both organizations worked together to build out rules supporting PayNearMe’s range of personalized payment experiences for customers of all sizes. 

The result was a transaction monitoring solution that could be tailored to fit the company’s evolving risk parameters and appetite. Particularly important was retaining efficiency as PayNearMe’s transaction volumes scaled: since a spike in false positives could threaten the company’s progress by burdening analysts with excessive cases, optimizing compliance workloads was crucial. 

PayNearMe stakeholders also mentioned the support offered by our team, including proactive suggestions on how to adapt rules to fit their unique requirements, as an important factor in the success of our partnership. 

“We chose ComplyAdvantage for transaction monitoring because we need to be able to not overly burden our compliance analysts with transactions they don’t need to look at. ComplyAdvantage was right on top of it in terms of fixing those rules, adjusting those rules, and giving us ideas on how we could get the information we wanted.”

Connor McNulty, Vice President of Legal and Chief Compliance Officer, PayNearMe 

Advanced transaction monitoring boosts productivity and results

As a result, PayNearMe’s compliance team has experienced substantial gains in both productivity and accuracy. According to Connor McNulty, Chief Compliance Officer, ComplyAdvantage has managed to halve the amount of time PayNearMe analysts spend on transaction monitoring while reducing the number of false positive alerts they see. 

This increased productivity has driven down remediation times even as PayNearMe has expanded its customer base, allowing the business to keep scaling its operations while maximizing its use of compliance resources. 

“ComplyAdvantage has saved our analysts about fifty percent of the time they previously spent on transaction monitoring. The system has helped us dramatically reduce our false positives, and has also given us the ability to adjust rules in real-time to fit what we need.”  

Connor McNulty, Vice President of Legal and Chief Compliance Officer, PayNearMe