Financial Crime Detection Company ComplyAdvantage Secures $50 Million

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jul 29, 2020
  • ComplyAdvantage — a global technology company that is transforming financial crime detection — announced that it has closed $50 million in Series C funding

ComplyAdvantage — a global technology company that is transforming financial crime detection — announced that it has closed $50 million in Series C funding. Including this round of funding, the company has raised a total of $88 million.

The Series C round of funding was led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board — one of the world’s largest pension plans with C$207.4 billion in net assets — through its Teachers’ Innovation Platform (TIP). That platform focuses on late-stage venture and growth equity investments in companies that use disruptive technology. And existing ComplyAdvantage investors Index Ventures and Balderton Capital also participated in the round.

With this round of funding, the company will apply the investment toward rapid product and market expansion across the United States, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Serving as the preferred choice of some of the world’s largest banks, enterprises, and high-growth fintechs, ComplyAdvantage utilizes machine learning and natural language processing to help regulated organizations manage risk obligations and prevent financial crime. And the company’s proprietary database is derived from millions of data points for providing dynamic and real-time insights across sanctions, watchlists, politically exposed persons, and negative news. This reduces dependence on manual review processes and legacy databases by up to 80% and improves how companies screen and monitor clients and transactions.

External risk indicators have been becoming harder to spot as the amount of information available grows exponentially and the speed of change gathers pace. And the COVID-19 pandemic has created additional challenges for governments and financial institutions. These institutions are having to decipher changes in transaction patterns and manage new levels of risk associated with large amounts of pandemic-relief funds during a mass and unplanned migration to remote working.

ComplyAdvantage is on a mission to neutralize the risk of money laundering, terrorist financing, corruption, and other financial crime. And over 500 enterprises in 75 countries rely on ComplyAdvantage to understand the risk of who they’re doing business with through the world’s only global real-time database of people and companies. The company is able to actively identify tens of thousands of risk events from millions of structured and unstructured data points every single day. ComplyAdvantage has four global hubs located in New York, London, Singapore, and Cluj-Napoca.

KEY QUOTES:

“Ontario Teachers’ deep experience and credibility with global financial institutions made them a natural choice to lead the round. Ontario Teachers’ takes a long view of investing that is genuinely aligned with our own vision at ComplyAdvantage to transform how companies mitigate risk. This funding allows us to accelerate the development of our industry-leading data and suite of products to serve institutions with diverse clients and complex risk exposure.”

— Charles Delingpole, Founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage

“ComplyAdvantage offers mission-critical technology solutions for combating financial crime and keeping pace with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape. The company is well positioned to continue its rapid growth as its powerful technology platform transforms the compliance and risk management process for its clients.”

— Olivia Steedman, Senior Managing Director, TIP, at Ontario Teachers’

“Detecting financial crime in billions of transactions that take place around the globe has become nearly impossible without the application of data science and machine learning. It is this approach that has made ComplyAdvantage into a leader in the category, and the go-to partner for organizations who seek to automate what are still very often manual or inadequate processes.”

— Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures