Eventus Unveils Anti-Money Laundering Platform Validus

Eventus has debuted an anti-money laundering (AML) platform for traditional finance and digital asset companies.

The Austin-based company, which provides transaction monitoring and market risk solutions, announced the cloud-based tool — dubbed Validus or VAML — in a news release Tuesday (Jan. 31). It comes in the wake of a year that saw a spike in fines levied against firms for failing to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes.

“Firms operating in traditional financial markets and digital assets alike are facing greater challenges than ever to protect themselves from those presenting a risk to their businesses and reputations, along with their standing with government regulators,” Eventus CEO Travis Schwab said in the release.

“Validus AML reimagines what an anti-money laundering program can do, reflecting a paradigm shift from traditional alert-focused solutions and taking the burden off compliance teams.”

The company says VAML uses signals-based technology and a “flexible approach to AML behavior modeling” to aggregate multiple events into one “scenario model,” thus greatly reducing false positive alerts and “producing highly effective, targeted results.”

In addition, VAML maintains a customer profile based on historical behaviors and transactions, and can notify users when customer activity deviates from these patterns.

As PYMNTS noted earlier this month, 2022 saw the penalties for failing to stop financial crimes such as money laundering jump by more than 50%.

Financial institutions were fined almost $5 billion for AML violations, flaws in know-your-customer (KYC) systems last year and breaches of sanctions, a study by the compliance firm Fenergo found.

Fines had been down the previous year, raising questions about the effectiveness of efforts to crack down on financial chrome following the 2008 crisis.

“There’s a lot of evidence, particularly in the U.K. and the U.S., in terms of recidivism … repeat offending by the big firms after they’ve been fined for things,” Huw McCartney, a University of Birmingham professor who has written about the impact of post-crisis fines on the Anglo-American banking sector, told the Financial Times.

“2022 was a really big year for sanctions,” Andrew Fierman, head of sanctions strategy at leading blockchain intelligence and data platform Chainalysis, told PYMNTS recently.

He was speaking about efforts to stop illicit activities in the cryptocurrency sector, noting the shift toward larger services and operations coming into focus.

“Historically we were looking at singular ransomware actors, now we are looking at entire exchanges, darknet markets, and a lot more aspects of crypto-crime related activity,” Fierman said, while also referencing other findings in his company’s forthcoming “Crypto Crime Report.”