Xapien’s double award in Chartis Research’s Financial Crime and Compliance 50 2024

We ranked number 33 in Chartis’s Financial Crime and Compliance 50 2024 (FCC50), and won the Entity Management award! This puts us amongst industry giants such as LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Moody’s and Oracle. Our AI due diligence solution is officially disrupting the market.

Chartis’s FCC50 report ranks worldwide technology solutions for anti-money laundering (AML); sanctions, politically exposed persons (PEP) and negative media screening; KYC systems; and the handling of financial crime-related data.

“We’re proud to be recognised by Chartis Financial Crime and Compliance50 and named Entity Management winner in the Core Technology category. This award reinforces our commitment to empowering compliance teams with actionable insights in a fraction of the time it traditionally takes. There was a huge participation, so being ranked among global providers by Chartis not only highlights our tool’s capabilities but also our growing presence in the market.”

Chris Green, CEO at Xapien

How does FCC50 score vendors?

The FCC50 methodology evaluates vendors based on six key criteria. 

1. Functionality and data coverage 
2. Core technology
3. Go to Market strategy 
4. Customer success 
5. Market presence 
6. Innovation 

The FinCrime and compliance market view

The report states that financial crime costs the global economy over $1.4 trillion every year. Criminals are getting smarter and using technology to commit more crimes quickly. However, institutions now have more sophisticated tools to stop them. In 2024, the financial crime and compliance market will be worth $25.6bn. By the end of 2025, it could grow to $26.8bn. 

Investment in adverse media 

Investment in managing watchlists and KYC data has seen significant growth. However, institutions are investing more into adverse media screening and data enrichment. Chartis anticipates double-digit spending growth in these areas for 2024. 

How Xapien is responding

Xapien empowers compliance teams with enriched data for any due diligence subject, including ESG factors, which are becoming more important. Xapien gives a far wider lens on adverse media than any other provider. This is reflected in our Entity Management award. 

Reducing Total Cost of Ownership

Few institutions have escaped the impact of the global economic downturn. At the same time, financial markets are highly competitive. Instead of reducing spend, institutions are looking at how technology can provide more value than legacy financial crime solutions in the long run. While Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis is nothing new, firms now demand long term  value-add from tools. This covers issues such as customer uplift, employee retention and upskilling, rather than just swapping out the cost of technology for labour.  

How Xapien is responding

Xapien delivers lasting value to its customers with zero integration costs. The platform runs from any browser and our easy user interface ensures that firms can get up and running in minutes. Xapien not only speeds up processes but also upskills employees, empowering them to identify risks and devise mitigation strategies, rather than simply gathering and processing data. Employees are happier and more loyal when they have efficient tools at their disposal. Plus, demand for AI from the workforce is growing. Likewise, customer loyalty grows when they have a streamlined experience. Our reports help firms improve their customer journey by facilitating faster onboarding and delivering a holistic experience. 

Driving financial inclusion

As regulations broaden, firms in vertical markets—FinTechs, non-banking financial institutions, insurance companies, and payment service providers—are increasingly seeking FinCrime technology, even those that hadn’t previously considered it. These sectors traditionally lacked such regulatory requirements or interest in FinCrime solutions. But the global push for financial inclusion now emphasises the importance of serving these markets, particularly smaller institutions that once lacked access to financial crime technology.

How Xapien is responding

We’re democratising access to clear and transparent data, not only for traditional financial institutions but also for private equity firms, insurance companies, law firms, and risk consultancies. The regulator now expects thorough due diligence on every client, investor, deal, or other third party. We recognised early on that these adjacent markets required a sophisticated due diligence tool to meet these expectations. However, their needs often differ subtly from those of legacy institutions. So, we built a solution to meet those needs.

Third party due diligence

Firms today must not only know their client base but also the entities they work with, including suppliers, vendors, and other third parties. This stem from three major shifts in the landscape: the increase in conscientious consumers and investors who carefully assess an organisation’s ethics, social impact, and supply chain transparency before making a purchase or investment; the surge in online data, allowing anyone to discover revealing information about a company or individual; and the rapidly evolving risk environment, including sanctions and globalisation, which impacts different parts of a company’s supply chain. Consequently, firms need to conduct deep due diligence and continuous monitoring to prevent legal, ethical, and regulatory issues. This requires a sophisticated due diligence tool to gain a comprehensive understanding of its history and associations.

How Xapien is responding

Xapien is designed for due diligence on all third parties from individual clients to large corporate entities. Hours of manual due diligence on third parties can be done in minutes by entering a name and additional context into Xapien. It then conducts searches in compliance datasets, cross-referencing that data with real-time information from news and media articles, corporate records, and various structured and unstructured sources. 

It connects the dots that analysts might overlook by reading and ‘learning’ with each search. For instance, a news article reveals that a third party has experienced multiple data breaches in the past, raising concerns about data security practices. While the first few pages of a manual web search might not raise any flags, Xapien will find and surface this information.

Demand for AI 

AI streamlines core compliance requirements such as KYC, transaction monitoring and sanctions screening. A key benefit of AI is automating manual, time-consuming, and costly tasks. It excels at handling tedious work, reducing the likelihood of human error and freeing up valuable human resources for more complex investigations. AI can continuously analyse data to identify potential risks before they escalate, helping institutions implement preemptive measures to mitigate those risks. 

How Xapien is responding

Xapien enables firms to take a proactive approach to risk management by anticipating risks before they happen. It goes beyond analysing data from static sources like watchlists, tapping into open-source information across the web. This capability allows Xapien to detect potential sanctions before individuals officially appear on a list. For example, even if someone isn’t listed yet, news and media articles might suggest they’ll be included soon. 

Data privacy concerns

Data privacy remains a significant concern when sharing data with suppliers and other third parties, leading to privacy and legal issues. With the regulator enforcing more fines for non-compliance, improved data management practices are needed. However, implementing and maintaining data privacy measures adds another layer of complexity and cost for firms.

How Xapien is responding

Xapien only needs a name and a second piece of context, such as a website link, to get started. Accessed through your browser, the platform is encrypted, similar to the technology used by online banking platforms. When conducting searches, there’s no connection back to the user. Since Xapien searches and reads open-source content only from the indexed web, it will only surface information that’s available publicly.

The key scoring criteria Xapien surpassed

Core technology: Chartis’s analysts praised Xapien’s strong “technical moat”, which comprises different AI models that orchestrate the automation of human research. It turns fragmented insights from structured and unstructured sources into actionable reports. This enables compliance teams to thoroughly understand third parties through a broader lens.

Clarity of strategy: The analysts also commended how well Xapien knows the markets it serves. Customers are at the heart of our roadmap; we look under the surface and go beyond what they expect from a tool. For instance, report writing was a significant burden in the compliance process. No other due diligence tools provide this capability, so clients didn’t expect it would be possible. We showed it was by introducing Xapien Insights, which harnesses Large Language Models to generate human-like written reports. Its capabilities exceed expectations by listening to customers in growing markets, particularly where third-party management and supply chain due diligence are becoming significant use cases.

Innovation: Chartis’s FCC50 report highlights the growing role of generative AI in KYC processes. The assessors recognised Xapien’s innovative proprietary machine learning techniques to extract and summarise relevant information that compliance professionals need to know. Xapien then uses a Large Language Model (LLM) as part of a broader ‘generative’ layer to summarise those insights into a concise paragraph, resembling a human-like written report. Chartis’s analysts noted its rapid and continuous innovation and response to new technological opportunities that can deliver more value for clients.

Market presence: Chartis analysts also recognised how fast Xapien has grown beyond traditional financial services and into adjacent markets like law firms and private equity firms, and excelling in use cases for third-party risk management and supply chain due diligence. Xapien is leading the way in meeting growing markets, surpassing our competitors.

Recognition in Chartis RiskTech100 2024

In case you missed it, our ranking in the Chartis FCC50 follows our inclusion in its RiskTech100 2024, a list of the world’s 100 most important players in risk & compliance technology. 

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