15 firms selected to tackle financial crime

We’re thrilled to announce the 15 innovative firms selected to progress to the next stage of our Innovation Call on Financial Crime. These firms will work hand-in-hand with industry partners and academic experts to tackle challenges of financial crime head-on.

Each firm brings a unique perspective and solution to the table, showcasing the power of diverse collaboration in tackling one of the most significant issues facing the financial sector today.

In this blog, we spotlight each of these firms, showcasing their vision, solutions, and the impact they’re set to make as they join us in shaping a safer financial future.

  Amiqus – amiqus.co

Amiqus is the UK’s most trusted compliance and onboarding platform supporting more than 500 organisations of all size and sectors; including the UK Government, The NHS and FNZ. Over 2.5 million people have been through Amiqus checks to date, and currently in the region of 74,000 checks are run monthly by our clients. We do this through offering a singular platform that can perform the whole ID Verification and onboarding process, end to end.

Amiqus was announced in Deloitte’s annual Fast 50 awards as the fastest-growing technology company in Scotland, the 20th fastest-growing in the UK and the 5th fastest-growing fintech in the UK. This growth has meant that we have the ability to continuously reinvest back into the product and innovate the ID Verification process. We are dedicated to continuous improvement and innovation in this area and would relish the opportunity to do this in conjunction with FRIL and the challenge sponsors.

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Argus Pro – https://arguspro.co.uk/

Argus Pro offers the comprehensive FinCrime HealthCheck™, which evaluates the effectiveness of all aspects of anti-financia

l crime (AFC) policies, procedures, processes, controls, and compliance culture, going far beyond traditional assessments. The FinCrime HealthCheck™ identifies gaps across teams, functions, geographies and leadership, aligns with leading regulatory frameworks and best practices outlined in the FCA’s Handbook and Financial Crime Guide, JMLSG, and the Wolfsberg Group’s Principles for Auditing for Effectiveness, and provides tailored recommendations to enhance effectiveness.

Our proposed platform, delivered as part of this Innovation Call, will combine this assessment with cutting-edge tools to deliver bespoke interpretations of current LRG updates, detail specific obligations, and anticipate future regulatory requirements, ensuring firms stay ahead of risks.

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Barrier – https://www.barriernetworks.com/

At Barrier, our mission is to help our customers build cyber resilience and develop strategies to defend against cyber-attacks. We are a cyber security service provider and are proud to be associated with 2 global leading identity solution vendors in responding to this innovation challenge:

-V-Key, an end-to-end innovative proposition designed to revolutionize identity authentication and authorisation processes, enhancing both security, efficiency & privacy

-Sumsub, a global identity verification provider, leverages cutting-edge technologies to provide a seamless end-to-end secure identity verification experience.

In participating in FRIL, we will seek to validate our collaborative proposition and its potential to transform the identity verification and authentication landscape with partners engaged in the programme.

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Datavillage – https://www.datavillage.ai/

Datavillage empowers organizations to combat financial crime by enabling secure data collaboration and access to fraud cases, flagged companies, suspicious accounts, devices, and more. This approach enhances the detection of fraud patterns, enables the fine-tuning of AI models, and supports advanced analytics for more effective prevention and response.

Through participating in the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab, we would like to leverage insights and feedback from industry partners to refine and scale solutions for broader commercial deployment.

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DX Compliance – http://dxcompliance.com/

Our proposed solution uses Generative AI that offers a unique opportunity to address these challenges by automating the repetitive aspects of alert reviews, enhancing the decision-making process, and providing more nuanced risk assessments. The core proposition involves developing an AI-powered system that leverages large language models (LLMs), deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) to support and augment human decision-making not only along the  KYC processes.

We look forward to working with partners across the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab to deepening our understanding across the challenge statements and broader financial crime domain.

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Encompass – https://www.encompasscorporation.com/

Encompass enables fast, accurate identity validation and verification of corporate customers and a gold standard approach to KYC. Our award-winning corporate digital identity (CDI) platform incorporates real time data and documents from authoritative global public data sources and private customer information to create and maintain digital risk profiles.

With encompass the world’s leading banks improve customer experience and increase business opportunities through consistent regulatory compliance and risk mitigation.

Through close collaboration with FRIL partners, we want to explore how our existing corporate identity platform can develop further to benefit organisations and their specific requirements for their Know Your Business onboarding and maintenance processes.

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Haelo – https://haelo.io/

HAELO is a RegTech innovator transforming Governance, Risk, and Compliance in

Financial Services. Our Horizon Scanning solution, REGENESIS, delivers instant access

to regulatory updates at a glance providing early detection of changes and empowering management to mitigate risk and avoid costly breaches.

Our IO (Intelligence Overlay) platform is at functional prototype stage and is designed to work in concert with REGENESIS to create a golden thread connecting regulation with obligations, controls and personal accountabilities. Through the FRIL programme, we would like to work with industry partners to develop our approach in the application of this platform and its role in the financial crime domain.

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Lasting Asset – https://lastingasset.com/

LastingAsset is a Trust-tech on a mission to stop fraud. Our core solution is a cryptographic device-to-device encryption protocol that tackles the growing menace of impersonation fraud. By combining advanced cryptography with decentralised identity management, it enables individuals and organisations to authenticate counterparties with unparalleled accuracy and privacy.

During the programme we will also pursue our innovation on fraud information sharing via a decentralised fully homomorphic encrypted network.

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Pytilia – https://pytilia.io/

Pytilia propose to address the ‘strengthening operational efficiencies in alert dispositioning’ challenge to optimise the manual review of KYC-related alerts, powered by our “always learning” feedback loop engine.  We have successfully used a solution blueprint combining rules-based & AI-powered logic to identify anomalies/alerts and present these for inspection & action by human analysts in our:

•winning pitch for FRIL’s inaugural Innovation call on “Simplifying Compliance”;

•PoC solution for the FCA’s recent Market Abuse TechSprint;

•Innovate UK-funded Cyber-AI Hub project (demonstrating its cross-domain applicability)

During the FRIL programme, guided by this previous experience, we propose to focus on the feedback loop aspect of such hybrid systems. We look forward to working with partners to demonstrate KYC alert filtering, prioritisation and reinforcement learning using scenarios/data relating to the alert review process.

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SenGuard – https://senguard.co.uk/

SENGUARD protects older adults from financial fraud by using real-time data analysis to detect and prevent scams before they happen.

SENGUARD’s innovative approach to financial crime prevention combines cutting-edge technology with a deep understanding of vulnerable users’ needs. Our solution not only addresses current financial crime patterns but is designed to evolve and adapt as new threats emerge.

With support from partners in the FRIL programme, we can enhance our capabilities and scale our impact in protecting vulnerable users from financial crime.

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Serene – https://www.myserene.io/

Serene leverages AI-driven insights to identify vulnerable consumers at heightened risk of scams, helping financial institutions prevent financial crime proactively. By using real-time detection, tailored interventions, and scalable integrations, we align with regulatory frameworks like FCA Consumer Duty and PSR reimbursement requirements, ensuring compliance while enhancing customer protection.

Through participating in the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab, we would like to collaborate with partners and validate Serene’s predictive model for identifying scams through Vulnerable Characteristics.

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Sopra Steria – https://www.soprasteria.co.uk/

Our innovative solution called the Optimised Decision Engine (ODE), leverages our unique and patent pending AI engine to generate and optimise human-interpretable rulesets for business decisioning, particularly in detecting fraud, scams, and money laundering. Unlike traditional black-box AI solutions that often lack explainability, ODE prioritises transparency, trustworthiness, and auditability, ensuring that its outputs are clear and comprehensible.

Through participating in the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab, we look forward to working with partners to exploring the calibration of the tool with a wide range of data volumes and types, understanding the optimal configuration for each dataset.

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Swordbreaker – https://www.swordbreaker.co.uk/

Ingenious protection against ransomware with minimal access to the systems and no access to the data it protects.  The product we are building doesn’t just raise the alarm; it actively disrupts cyber criminals as they try to steal your data and sabotage your systems.

Swordbreaker’s solution can protect any operating system, including legacy and Operational Technology (OT) from bulk data theft and file encryption.  It works on its own or alongside existing security tools to reduce your risk from ransomware.

We would like to work with FRIL partners to deepen our understanding of their risks in financial crime and their regulatory requirements to help us shape our first solution and design Swordbreaker’s product suite for the future.

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Threat Fabric – https://www.threatfabric.com/

ThreatFabric enables safe & frictionless online customer journeys by integrating industry-leading threat intel, behavioural analytics, advanced device intelligence and over 10.000 adaptive fraud indicators. We will be seeking to progress two propositions centred around 1) Data-driven, Digital Fraud and Scam Detection and 2) Proactive Mobile Threat Intelligence (MTI).

As part of the FRIL programme, we would like to explore whether new data sources can be used to provide further coverage for the hardest-to-detect fraud and work with partners across data such as telecommunications, smshing and location data.

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VeriFoxx – https://verifoxx.com/

Verifoxx enables financial institutions to share verified intelligence, to tackle financial crime and fraud, but without any data ever leaving its owner, reducing privacy and commercial risks. Leveraging Privacy Enhancing Technologies such as Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), Multi-Party Computation (MPC) and Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), Verifoxx addresses the critical challenge of how different companies can collaborate and connect data points, but without ever exposing their data.

Through the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab, we would like to explore with partners how the financial services and telco sectors could exchange intelligence to investigate or even  stop a scam from happening.

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