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News and resources on financial crime, including fraud, scams, Anti Money Laundering and Know Your Customer.

ThetaRay unveils Sonar

Source: ThetaRay

ThetaRay, a leading provider of AI-based Big Data analytics, today launched SONAR, the industry's most advanced financial crime prevention solution for cross-border payments.

By providing full visibility across complex, cross-border transaction paths, the SaaS solution enables banks, financial institutions and businesses to increase their volume of transfers without the risk of being exploited for money laundering, terrorist financing, human trafficking, and narco-trafficking. This announcement follows on the heels of ThetaRay's recent $31M funding round.

Cross-border payments are crucial transactions that connect local economies throughout the world to the global financial system. However, they often involve a complicated sequence of banks operating across multiple currencies in different countries, making it nearly impossible for banks to have transparency into who the beneficiaries are. Banks and regulators are losing trust in industry AML controls and each other as they search for effective measures to confront the threats and reduce and remove risk from their ecosystem. This limits industry growth and prevents underserved economies from accessing global capital.

SONAR is designed to instill certainty and eliminate risks in cross-border payments, and to protect banks, fintech companies and private companies that conduct payment transfers. Using machine learning algorithms developed by renowned mathematics professors Amir Averbuch and Ronald Coifman, SONAR protects users against attempts to abuse their money transfer platforms for sophisticated money laundering schemes. The solution can be easily integrated and deployed within days, with minimal implementation required. With its ability to detect even the earliest signs of illicit activity, SONAR enables users to rapidly increase revenues, significantly reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), improve customer service, and boost ROI.

"For the first time in the history of cross-border transactions, risk and revenue are no longer a trade-off," said Mark Gazit, CEO of ThetaRay. "SONAR is the new standard for trusted global transactions, providing an accurate assessment of risk and enabling safe, secure cross-border payments for financial services providers and their partners. Best of all, it can be up and running within days, providing immediate value."

SONAR enhances ThetaRay's AML solution for correspondent banking, which has long been used by large global financial institutions such as Santander and CecaBank to bolster their defenses. SONAR expands on the previous solution by:

Revealing suspicious transaction profiles and unlocking hidden insights from not only SWIFT traffic, but also all major real time & automated clearing house (ACH) schemes
Enabling data ingestion via all major formats, including RJE, API, CSV and XML.
Enhancing SAAS offering introducing user-friendly APIs for low-effort integration and maintenance
Providing a flexible global support model

"What Swift did to the banking world 25 years ago, ThetaRay will do to the banking world in the next ten years," said Erel Margalit, JVP founder and Chairman, and ThetaRay's Board Chairman. "Business security and co-operation between countries will be possible when financial cybercriminals are left out of the secure system that ThetaRay has created together with the banks."

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