PAYSTRAX Selects Sentinels to Boost AML Transaction Monitoring for European Payment Services

Amsterdam, 13 December 2021 – Sentinels, Europe’s leadingintelligent transaction monitoring platform, has been selected by European merchant acquirer, PAYSTRAX uab, to enhance the anti-money laundering (AML) processes for its portfolio of European payment services and future-proof the business in line with the increasingly stringent regulatory environment in Lithuania.

PAYSTRAX selected Sentinels for its highly adaptable platform which provides simple and customizable rules-based alerts and real-time, data-driven insights. This reduces the number of false positives thrown up by the system and provides a more comprehensive view of risk across the transaction environment.

As a result of the partnership, PAYSTRAX’s compliance analysts can identify suspicious transactions with greater precision, speed and efficiency, leading to substantially reduced client risk and, ultimately, the elimination of money laundering activity from its processing services.

Joost van Houten, CEO of Sentinels, comments: “Online payments crime is causing significant pain across the industry for payment service providers and merchants. Our self-improving operations, based on a hybrid of business rules and machine learning algorithms, help these organizations to eliminate illicit activities without wasting money and time on false-positive alerts. We’re excited to work with PAYSTRAX on improving AML detection rates and support its efforts in increasing both efficiency and compliance with the Lithuanian regulator – enabling it to operate and scale uninhibited by regulatory compliance.”

Regulators across the world have varying requirements that impact transaction monitoring and the filing of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). The rapid transformation of the financial sector, however, driven by the digitization of payments and the overall increase in payment providers, has resulted in the entire regulatory space becoming more stringent. Lithuania is a leading force in this regard and has recently revamped its regulatory landscape to reduce the economic and societal harm caused by money laundering and terrorist financing.

In response, PAYSTRAX chose to future-proof its transaction monitoring capability to ensure ongoing compliance with European and Lithuanian AML laws, and to help meet the regulatory reporting requirements of its supervising authority, the Bank of Lithuania.

Johannes Kolbeinsson, CEO and co-founder of PAYSTRAX, explains: “We offer clients the assurance of multi-layered fraud prevention technology, backed by our team of risk experts. Our top priority when bringing on Sentinels was to reduce the number of transaction monitoring alerts we were receiving while increasing our true positive rate. The excellent rate delivered by the Sentinels platform will have a major impact on the quality of alerts we receive, allowing for a faster response time to suspicious transactions, complete abidance to Lithuanian regulations, and significant time savings for our transaction analysts.”

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