PPRO, the leading local payments infrastructure provider, has today announced a strategic partnership and minority investment in Sentinels, Europe’s leading transaction monitoring startup based out of the Netherlands. The partnership will enhance anti-money laundering (AML) controls for PPRO and its customers by enabling an even faster response time to suspicious transactions.

Using AI and machine learning, Sentinels helps fast growing fintechs, payment service providers, remittance companies, and (challenger) banks manage risk and fulfil their compliance obligations. The Sentinels platform monitors transactions, builds rich behavioural profiles, detects a wide range of suspicious activity, and automatically generates recommended next steps – saving time and effort for compliance teams.

As digital transactions have skyrocketed over the past years, and further accelerated since the pandemic began, fintechs and other financial institutions need to increasingly focus on cracking down on money laundering and other illegal activity attempts on their platforms. A recent article in the Economist speaks of the challenges of doing this in a scalable way and calls the resulting reports to the regulator an epidemic of Suspicious Activity Reports.

The partnership enhances PPRO’s anti-money laundering (AML) controls, enabling their team to react even faster to suspicious transactions and protect the customers they serve from financial crime risks. The full Sentinels platform will also be offered as a value-added service to PPRO’s customers: leading global payment service providers, banks, and enterprises with payment platforms.

Simon Black, CEO of PPRO, said: “the Sentinels’ platform and machine learning-generated insights will give our risk and compliance teams a streamlined workflow. Being able to detect money laundering and other financial crime risks in real time is incredibly valuable to our customers. That’s why we’re delighted to invest in and begin building a strategic relationship with Sentinels, who have proven to be an innovative firm with an extremely powerful product.”

Joost van Houten, Founder and CEO of Sentinels, commented: “Never has there been a more critical time for businesses to bolster their transaction monitoring systems. We predict an increased demand for AI-driven risk management services as digital payments rapidly increase and regulators intensify their focus on preventing financial crime. We are excited to have PPRO’s support and enormously proud to be a valuable part of their unique local payment's ecosystem – helping businesses quickly and safely increase their global footprint. Unique to our partnership with PPRO is that Sentinels will be able to monitor for suspicious activity across PPRO’s customers, enabling cross-institutional monitoring which is the next exciting frontier in compliance.”