World Leader in Financial Crime Detection Technology Backed by Funding from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Index Ventures, and Balderton Capital
NEW YORK and TORONTO, July 29, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — ComplyAdvantage, a global technology company transforming financial crime detection, has announced the close of a US$50 million Series C funding round, bringing the total investment to date to US$88M. The company will apply the investment toward rapid product and market expansion across the United States, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.
The Series C round was led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’), one of the world’s largest pension plans with C$207.4 billion in net assets, through its Teachers’ Innovation Platform (TIP), which focuses on late-stage venture and growth equity investments in companies that use disruptive technology. Existing ComplyAdvantage investors Index Ventures and Balderton Capital also participated in the round.
“Ontario Teachers’ deep experience and credibility with global financial institutions made them a natural choice to lead the round,” said Charles Delingpole, Founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage. “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.”
Already the preferred choice of some of the world’s largest banks, enterprises and high-growth fintechs, ComplyAdvantage uses machine learning and natural language processing to help regulated organizations manage their risk obligations and prevent financial crime. The company’s proprietary database is derived from millions of data points that provide dynamic, 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.
“ComplyAdvantage offers mission-critical technology solutions for combating financial crime and keeping pace with an ever-evolving regulatory landscape,” said Olivia Steedman, Senior Managing Director, TIP, at Ontario Teachers’. “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.”
External risk indicators are becoming harder to spot as the amount of information available grows exponentially and the speed of change gathers pace. COVID-19 has created additional challenges for governments and financial institutions. They 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.
“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,” said Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures.
About Ontario Teachers’
The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’) is the administrator of Canada’s largest single-profession pension plan, with C$207.4 billion in net assets (all figures as at December 31, 2019). It holds a diverse global portfolio of assets, approximately 80% of which is managed in-house, and has earned an annual total-fund net return of 9.7% since the plan’s founding in 1990. Ontario Teachers’ is an independent organization headquartered in Toronto. Its Asia-Pacific region office is located in Hong Kong and its Europe, Middle East & Africa region office is in London. The defined-benefit plan, which is fully funded, invests and administers the pensions of the province of Ontario’s 329,000 active and retired teachers. For more information, visit otpp.com and follow us on Twitter @OtppInfo.
About ComplyAdvantage
ComplyAdvantage is the financial industry’s leading source of AI-driven financial crime risk data and detection technology. ComplyAdvantage’s mission is to neutralize the risk of money laundering, terrorist financing, corruption, and other financial crime. More than 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 actively identifies 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 and is backed by Ontario Teachers’, Index Ventures and Balderton Capital. Learn more at complyadvantage.com.