Qonto accelerates multi-market growth with streamlined AML screening

Qonto is a European business finance solution for freelancers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), providing an all-in-one platform for bookkeeping, expense tracking, cash flow management, and payment accounts. The business is headquartered in Paris, with various other operating locations across Europe. 

Its innovative products have seen it go from strength to strength since its launch in 2017: Qonto is used by over 500,000 companies in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Eventually, this consistent trajectory of growth began to have implications for the company’s anti-money laundering (AML) compliance – and vice versa. 

A reliance on manual screening drains resources 

Over the past few years, Qonto has seen rapid growth, and anticipated this to continue across multiple EU markets. However, this growth posed significant challenges from a compliance perspective. A reliance on manual processes – often consisting of individual internet searches on customers to identify risks – caused alert backlogs, increasing the chance of risks being missed and restricting the rate at which Qonto could onboard new customers. 

To optimize its compliance team’s productivity and increase its customer acquisition rate, Qonto decided to move away from these fragmented, resource-heavy systems and look for a solution that could streamline essential processes and empower analysts to carry out higher-quality work. 

Going forward, it was critical that Qonto’s compliance solution could maintain a high level of efficiency and support continued, fast-paced business growth. 

The need for efficiency and scalability leads Qonto to ComplyAdvantage

In their search for a RegTech partner, Qonto evaluated vendors against four key criteria: 

• Usability: Clear functionality and an intuitive user interface were important to ensure a smooth transition to Qonto’s new compliance setup and minimize mistakes and delays. 
• Robust compliance features: With clear regulatory obligations, Qonto needed a solution that could help them demonstrate compliance to relevant authorities. 
• Operational efficiency: Reliable customer support and a strong service-level agreement (SLA) for fast data updates were crucial. This would allow Qonto to significantly streamline essential compliance checks, reducing manual effort and improving response times.
• Scalability: The company needed a solution that could seamlessly support rapid growth, evolving to cover an increasing volume of customers, transactions, and new product offerings without compromising performance or compliance integrity.

These factors led Qonto to select ComplyAdvantage for Customer Screening and Payment Screening, with standout features of our solutions directly addressing these priorities. These included: 

• Consolidated views of risks: Our user-friendly platform gives compliance analysts relevant insights into customer risks on a single screen, avoiding the pitfalls of siloed data and systems. 
• Regulatory expertise: Our teams combine expertise in financial crime data and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) with deep knowledge of the regulatory and risk environments, allowing us to support Qonto’s unique local and multi-jurisdictional requirements. 
• Real-time data updates: Our proprietary financial crime risk data is refreshed using automated systems, with adverse media searches enhanced with AI for improved accuracy. Data is sourced straight from regulators and other reliable sources, with expert verification for peace of mind. 
• Flexible screening: ComplyAdvantage’s Customer Screening and Ongoing Monitoring solutions are fully customizable to organizations’ risk profiles. A modular, API-first architecture supports flexible integration and scalability. 

Since Qonto operates in multiple European countries, ComplyAdvantage’s ability to support screening in different languages – with screening platforms able to adapt to different naming conventions and linguistic nuances – was also hugely beneficial as the company looked to continually grow its business across all relevant markets. 

Customizability and ongoing support create an adaptable solution

Qonto’s strong compliance performance since adopting ComplyAdvantage’s screening solutions has led to a five-year partnership. During this time, support from ComplyAdvantage’s Customer Success team has been critical – both during the implementation phase and beyond. 

“ComplyAdvantage is a solid solution, especially if you’re looking for a solution that can grow with your business and adapt to a complex regulatory environment.” 

Marina Lagos Muñoz, Senior Lead AFC Sanctions & Investigation, Qonto

ComplyAdvantage’s responsiveness, flexibility, and technical knowledge helped Qonto conduct thorough testing of their systems and calibrate screening processes to their needs with configurable rulesets and parameters. Configurable rulesets and, while data reporting via detailed dashboards helps Qonto identify performance trends and areas for improvement across case management. 

The result has been a compliance solution that gives Qonto full control. As the business continues to expand into different markets and adapt to new regulatory requirements, ComplyAdvantage’s platform has been able to grow along with them and ensure that compliance supports, rather than delays, this growth.