Budapest-based SEON, an online fraud prevention platform, announced on Monday that it has acquired its counterpart Complytron, a compliance and anti-money laundering (AML) specialist.
SEON will now add AML capabilities to its fraud-fighting toolkit. This will help the company to offer a single source for FinCrime intelligence combined with decision functionality to address evolving regulatory requirements.
The agreement, which became final in January 2023, represents SEON’s growth since its record-breaking $94M Series B investment in early 2022.
Complytron: Everything you need to know
In 2019, Oliver Lebhardt, Abris Gryllus, and Zoltan Varju founded Complytron. As an investigative data journalist, Oliver’s interest in automating research gave rise to it.
The company began searching for commercial applications for the programme after receiving Google DNI funding in 2019 for the Source Code Leak project. The project employed digital fingerprinting techniques to expose hidden links between apparently unconnected organisations.
This is when the founders realised, risk analysts and AML officers could use the tool during KYC onboarding, AML/CTF processes and all kinds of due diligence applications.
Complytron’s tools are helpful for businesses of all sizes as they are rushing to ensure they are complying with the most recent regulatory standards. Especially in light of 6AMLD’s recent decision to make AML background checks mandatory for many more organisations in Europe.
The company is committed to offering a solution that is simple to use, whether the need is to perform 500 checks a month or 50,000.
Aim of this acquisition
SEON made this move in reaction to the urgent need for reliable AML solutions as the world prepares for a political and humanitarian environment that is becoming more and more unstable. According to FT, this shift is underlined by a global surge in AML fines, which rose by 50 per cent in the past year alone.
SEON believes that the fusion of fraud, AML, and data enrichment technologies is expected to assist governments and enterprises in overcoming obstructive information silos. SEON’s existing anti-fraud APIs, together with new AML functionality, provide a potent platform.
This would enable onboarding checks to operate discreetly in the background, eliminating false positives and enhancing the experience of genuine transactors while monitoring financial activities in real-time to detect signals of fraud and money laundering.
SEON says its rule editing options, together with Complytron’s data, will also bring a significant competitive advantage in the money laundering prevention market.
By leveraging machine learning, AI automation and real-time checks, the company is eliminating the need for separate searches across different databases by combining intelligence from multiple sources.
This includes databases of Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), a compilation of global sanctions and criminal lists, and watch lists compiled by supervisory agencies and national law enforcement from more than a hundred international sources, including the FBI and Interpol.
Tamas Kadar, co-founder of SEON, says, “Rather than building an AML solution from the ground up, it made perfect sense for us to acquire Complytron’s extensive and innovative algorithms and worldwide databases – as well as the expertise of its talented team.”
“By completing this acquisition, we have increased our total addressable market by approximately $6B. This means we are instantly able to solve the challenges of risk and compliance management for even more businesses. In today’s landscape, having this 360° view of individuals and business partners isn’t an option, it’s a regulatory must,” adds Kadar.
As part of the deal, SEON will receive full ownership of Complytron’s technologies as well as its personnel, including its specialised AML team. Oliver Lebhardt, co-founder and CEO of Complytron, will join SEON together with Abris Gryllus, co-founder and UX lead, and his team.
What’s next for SEON?
With this deal, the company claims it has introduced a new solution, which is already in use. The solution combines APIs for critical real-time information and sends out notifications right away if a person’s risk status changes.
By evaluating not just consumers but also the people they are related to, SEON’s technology, which offers a know-your-customer (KYC) check, can now find hidden, hazardous links on behalf of clients.
SEON says it is now positioned for further growth in 2023, including its inception into the US and bolstering its 300-strong team growth.
