Tala drives global expansion with fast, flexible customer screening

Tala is a financial platform building the infrastructure needed to enable financial agency across the world. By leveraging data and mobile technology across its vertically integrated platform, it delivers in-demand financial services, including credit, savings, and payments, to its global customer base. 

Based in Santa Monica, Tala operates across three continents and has deployed over $6 billion in credit to over ten million customers. The size and scale of its business, as well as its digital-first model, mean Tala faces multiple regulatory requirements and often complex financial crime risks that require it to detect and prevent financial crime in real time. 

Tala therefore maintains a compliance strategy built around three pillars: proactive risk awareness, cross-functional alignment, and a strong culture of compliance. Shellie Schumaker, the company’s VP, Global Compliance, describes compliance as a “strategic asset” that enables sustainable growth by building strong relationships with regulators and enhancing customer loyalty. 

As part of an evolving compliance strategy and expansion into new markets, Tala turned to ComplyAdvantage to help it meet these compliance and business objectives. 

Flexibility and low latency make the difference during Tala’s expansion 

Tala has to screen all its customers to identify any financial crime risks, including against sanctions lists, watchlists, adverse media, and politically exposed person (PEP) information. However, before partnering with ComplyAdvantage, it relied on manual screening checks, which suffered from inflexibility, an inherent lack of speed, and the potential for human error. 

This created delays and customer dissatisfaction during onboarding, and meant that business growth was not being accounted for in compliance processes. Tala therefore sought out a new solution, with essential criteria including: 

• Automation capabilities, to cut down on manual processes and enable a seamless customer experience. 
• User-friendliness and ease of implementation. 
• Flexible screening and extensive data coverage, to support global operations and avoid Tala having to use a new solution in each market.
• Scalability and support for Tala’s growth mission. 
• Robust compliance with all regulatory requirements. 

ComplyAdvantage came out on top on all of these factors during Tala’s selection process. The ability to support business outcomes through low-latency customer screening, global data coverage across all relevant markets and risk types, and an intuitive user interface were all mentioned by Tala’s leadership as standout features. 

“There was so much flexibility in what ComplyAdvantage was offering us that it set them apart from any of the other solutions we were looking at.” 

Shellie Schumaker, VP, Global Compliance, Tala 

These proved especially important when Tala began to expand its operations into the Philippines. ComplyAdvantage’s ongoing customer support, regulatory expertise, and deep understanding of Tala’s risks and business model meant Tala could implement tailored customer screening to support compliance and business goals. 

Single platform and ongoing support support consistent results

According to Tala stakeholders, the integration capabilities and usability of ComplyAdvantage’s solution have been significant factors in its success. Thanks to our API-first integration that removes the need for disruption to existing workflows, the implementation process went smoothly, with all deadlines and criteria relating to the launch being met. 

Since implementing the solution, the benefits of ComplyAdvantage’s unified platform have been clear. Being able to review all customer risks, case decisions, and performance analytics in one place has improved analysts’ productivity and decision-making, where previously time was wasted toggling between separate systems and datasets. 

This has also been helpful in Tala’s conversations with regulators, with the clarity of ComplyAdvantage’s platform allowing the company to more easily demonstrate how it meets and exceeds its obligations. 

“Having a centralized platform… was something that we all knew would be instrumental in the ability for us to scale as well as to be able to meet our regulatory obligations.”

Shellie Schumaker, VP, Global Compliance, Tala 

In addition to the platform itself, Tala has praised the “fantastic” relationship it has with ComplyAdvantage’s technical and customer support teams, whose flexibility, openness, responsiveness and expertise have been critical in ensuring Tala has a world-class customer screening solution tailored to its needs. 

“ComplyAdvantage’s customer account and technical support teams truly understand your needs and are willing to get to the nitty-gritty of what you need to be successful.” 

Shellie Schumaker, VP, Global Compliance, Tala 

AI and automation upgrade Tala’s efficiency 

ComplyAdvantage’s AI and automation capabilities have also been namechecked as a major upgrade for Tala, allowing the company to improve its operational efficiency, customer experiences, and regulatory compliance in all its markets. Key examples include: 

• Entity resolution and entity clustering to optimize the accuracy of alerts and drive down false positives. 
• Advanced search techniques that go beyond the simple text-matching used in legacy solutions. 
• Automated ongoing customer monitoring, removing the need for fixed re-screening processes and reducing risk exposure. 
• Alert prioritization that means compliance analysts’ time is spent efficiently and the highest-risk cases are tackled first. 
• Scenario optimization to ensure risk frameworks reflect evolving financial crime typologies.

“The differences we have seen with this solution have really been around automation. This solution has built operational efficiency, it has built seamless customer interactions, and compliance within all of our markets.” 

Shellie Schumaker, VP, Global Compliance, Tala 

Features like these mean ComplyAdvantage has proved to be an ideal fit for fast-growing, technology-forward firms like Tala, with reduced alert volumes, false positives, and remediation times some of the tangible benefits. With ComplyAdvantage, Tala has therefore been able to approve lending applications more quickly and grow its customer acquisition rate. 

ComplyAdvantage’s innovative, flexible, and reliable platform, combined with ongoing customer support, continues to give Tala increased security as it grows its customer base, while saving its compliance team significant time across its day-to-day operations. 

“I would tell other companies looking at ComplyAdvantage as a viable solution for their AML screening to look no further.” 

Shellie Schumaker, VP, Global Compliance, Tala