Startup Offers New Solution To Money Laundering ‘False Alarms’

An Israeli fintech startup that uses AI to rule out legitimate customer transactions and help banks focus on suspicious activity has raised $13 million. 

Refine Intelligence prevents false alarms by asking customers for relevant information, such as the source of the funds used for the transactions, that often get flagged by the anti-money laundering monitoring tech used by banks. 

It has also trained AI with data sets of genuine customer activity, allowing it to automatically recognize when customer stories are true. 

According to the startup, banks devote many resources to investigating false money laundering alarms.

This is because the monitoring tech used by banks today receive transaction monitoring alerts that spot anomalies in customer accounts, even though many of these transactions have legitimate reasons, such as selling a house, buying a used car or paying university tuition fees. 

The funding was raised by Glilot Capital Partners and Fin Capital with participation from SYN Ventures, Valley Ventures (the corporate venture capital arm of Valley Bank), and others.

“Banks used to have a superpower: knowing their customers’ life stories so they could provide personalized financial service,” said Refine Intelligence co-founder and CEO Uri Rivner.

“With banking increasingly done online and a significant drop in face-to-face interactions, banks’ understanding of customer behavior is limited. Refine Intelligence restores that critical context, empowering banks to ‘catch the good guys’ – identify false alarms triggered by perfectly legitimate customer transactions, and focus their energy on actual dubious activity.”