TransferMate reduces alert remediation times by up to 50%

TransferMate is one of the world’s leading B2B payments infrastructure-as-a-service companies. Based in Ireland, the company enables individuals and businesses to make seamless, cost-effective cross-border payments in more than 201 countries and 141 currencies.

TransferMate aims to have “the best compliance team in the business,” explains Alex Clements, the firm’s Global Head of Financial Investigations and Monitoring. A crucial step toward this goal was identifying an anti-money laundering solution capable of operating 24/7, handling rapidly growing transaction volumes, and working in near real-time to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Embracing agility in compliance

In its search process, TransferMate looked for a partner that could help its compliance analysts stay ahead of rapidly changing criminal behavior. That required a customizable solution capable of managing multiple risk scenarios as well as accommodating new information from law enforcement and other sources.

TransferMate chose to work ComplyAdvantage due to its global data coverage, comprehensive real-time sanctions updates, and the ease with which analysts could configure its system.

“We chose ComplyAdvantage because we wanted a complete solution. We wanted to strip back our data and understand every data point within our model,” explained Clements. “With ComplyAdvantage, we were able to build a complete rule set, so we could understand the exact risks we’re facing in our business.”

“We’re experts in global payments, not experts in compliance systems. That’s why we left it to ComplyAdvantage.”

– Alex Clements, Global Head of Financial Investigations and Monitoring.

Adopting a “one team, two organizations” approach

From the beginning, it was important for TransferMate to partner with a provider that understood its business and clients. During the implementation process, both teams communicated almost daily. Clements described this as a “one team, two organizations” approach. TransferMate worked with ComplyAdvantage implementation consultants to define its data model and scope out the bespoke rules it wanted to build for transaction risk management. ComplyAdvantage’s solution is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The firm used its industry expertise to help TransferMate achieve its goals, sharing ideas and best practices.

“We weren’t just looking for a vendor. We wanted to choose a partner, somebody that would work with us and would strive for the best quality and customer satisfaction.”

– Alex Clements, Global Head of Financial Investigations and Monitoring

Over time, the continued strong relationship with the firm’s dedicated customer success manager at ComplyAdvantage has been critical. This close partnership has grown over time, ensuring ComplyAdvantage is well-positioned to support TransferMate’s continued growth.

Providing complete control

Less than a year after its implementation with ComplyAdvantage, TransferMate has reduced the time it spends investigating transaction risk alerts by up to 50%. Analysts complete transactions that hit a compliance control in up to 40 minutes.

TransferMate has also experienced a reduction in false-positive alerts, giving analysts more time to focus on the alerts that present a real risk.

Another benefit the payments firm has experienced is in the education space. TransferMate onboards many universities where a family member is often making payments on behalf of the student. The control granted to the compliance team by ComplyAdvantage has enabled TransferMate to provide “comfort” to its customers, explains Clements.

“I’d recommend partnering with ComplyAdvantage. We have complete control over our front end here at TransferMate. The system is straightforward to use, and the data is live. We’re screening in real-time, and that gets us closer to our goal of being the best compliance team in the business.”

– Alex Clements, Global Head of Financial Investigations and Monitoring

Improving compliance efficiency with BIC screening

TransferMate was shortlisted for Best Compliance Team alongside ComplyAdvantage’s customer success and implementation teams at the 2022 International Compliance Awards. Following the nomination, the team has continued to grow its successful partnership as TransferMate scales. 

Another example of the team’s successful collaboration was discussed at a Transaction Monitoring Bootcamp run by ComplyAdvantage and FINTRAIL. In the series, Clements and TransferMate’s customer success manager, Shane Chard, explained how the team worked together to improve TransferMate’s transaction screening process.

Firms like TransferMate have a regulatory obligation to screen all parts of the transactions they handle against sanctions lists, which include clients, counterparties, and counterparty banks. When TransferMate started working with ComplyAdvantage, transaction screening rules were set up to cover all of these data points. However, one rule set up to screen sanctioned counterparty banks was creating a high volume of false positives. This was because the rule was set up to screen by bank name, which was not always accurate. To optimize these rules, ComplyAdvantage segmented them based on the direction of the payment and the owner of the transaction flow. This allowed TransferMate to apply different fuzziness levels and algorithm levers to the rule configurations, ultimately reducing the number of false positive alerts created.

As well as segmenting the rules, the team needed a unique identifier, as screening by name is not always the most accurate data point for banks or counterparties. In creating a more effective solution, the team built a bank identification code (BIC) screening solution that proved to help identify sanctioned banks and reduce false positives. However, with the new rule came a duplication of labor, which caused extra work for TransferMate’s compliance team.

To solve this issue, TransferMate proposed a logic change that would only trigger the new BIC screening rule if a BIC was present in the transaction data and only trigger the counterparty bank sanctions rule if the BIC was not present. Implementing two rules that would be triggered based on the data entering the transaction monitoring software was a unique solution. Previously, almost half a percent of all transactions hit this rule, making it the second-highest triggering rule under counterparty sanctions screening. Combining these two new rules reduced the combined alert volume to a minimal amount.