Xapien awarded Financial Crime Data Management by Chartis RiskTech100® 2025 

For the second year in a row, Xapien has made the Chartis Research RiskTech100® 2025, the most comprehensive independent study of the world’s major players in risk and compliance technology. The RiskTech100® is globally acknowledged as the go-to source for clear, accurate analysis of the risk technology marketplace. Alongside our Crime Investigation Support and Copilot award this year, winning the RiskTech100® Financial Crime Data Management award reflects our rising rank in the risk technology market. 

How did the RiskTech100® 2025 score vendors?

The methodology evaluates vendors based on six key criteria. 

1. Functionality 
2. Core technology
3. Strategy 
4. Customer satisfaction 
5. Market presence 
6. Innovation 

Chartis Research: FinCrime market highlights

Fraud and Anti-Money Laundering (FRAML) 

The Chartis RiskTech100® report found that an increasing number of financial institutions are investing in integrated Fraud and Anti-Money Laundering (FRAML) platforms to improve risk detection capabilities, enable seamless collaboration between teams, and efficiently scale operations. How they are achieving this varies: some financial institutions are outsourcing FRAML efforts to third-party firms, while others are restructuring their operations to align FRAML solutions with more sophisticated customer journeys. In particular, financial institutions are turning to machine learning (ML) tools to reduce manual work, identify suspicious activity more quickly, and adapt to emerging threats.

Increasing spend on watchlist and adverse media tools 

With increasing regulatory scrutiny and evolving financial crime threats, watchlist and adverse media screening are becoming essential tools for mitigating risk, ensuring compliance, and protecting reputations. These tools allow financial institutions to stay ahead of emerging risks by enriching screening data with contextual information. 

Globally, financial institutions invest nearly $7 billion annually in watchlist and adverse media solutions. These tools rely on dynamic technologies that evolve to meet the shifting landscape of financial crime and compliance. AI and ML technologies are improving the accuracy and speed of watchlist and adverse media screening by identifying patterns and risks that may not be immediately apparent to human analysts. 

Regulatory reporting

The regulatory reporting landscape is facing significant transformation, with increasingly complex regulations and higher demands for transparency. Financial institutions are required to monitor and document a growing range of risk exposures, making effective regulatory reporting solutions more critical than ever. 

Regulatory Technology (RegTech) solutions are playing a key role in streamlining labour-intensive reporting work, such as gathering information and writing up red flag reports. By automating these workflows, RegTech reduces errors, cuts costs, and improves efficiency in meeting regulatory requirements.

To maximise the value of RegTech solutions, they must be part of an integrated compliance strategy. This integration enables seamless data sharing between compliance, finance, and business functions, reducing duplicated efforts and ensuring that institutions can respond quickly to regulatory changes.

How Xapien is serving the FinCrime market 

Financial institutions historically rely on disparate solutions—databases, corporate registries, curated news sources, and open web searches—for FRAML due diligence. 

But this approach has limitations, especially when it comes to traditional watchlists and adverse media tools. These tools are often confined to specific databases and provide a narrow view of risk. In contrast, open-source research democratises access to everything published online, making it a more comprehensive resource for identifying potential risks. 

The key difference between curated databases and open-source research lies in the scope and depth of available data. Procured databases were originally designed for large, traditional banks to tackle anti-money laundering and other serious crimes, but their technology hasn’t kept up with the rapidly evolving risk landscape. 

Databases contain only pre-collected, static information that may not capture emerging risks in real-time. Many compliance processes also rely on manual research using keyword searches to supplement database information. However, keyword searches are limited by predefined terms, meaning they may miss new risk signals or red flags that haven’t yet been included into existing search criteria.

What’s needed is a single platform that can automate the entire due diligence process in minutes, providing a holistic view of a subject’s risk profile. Xapien offers just that—an automated tool that pulls information from both structured and unstructured data. It integrates full sanctions, PEPs, and watchlist screening data with contextual insights from open sources, such as news articles, press releases, interviews, and company websites.

What sets Xapien apart in the risk technology market—and why Chartis analysts named us a “One to Watch” in Financial Crime Data Management—is our unique ability to blend both that structured data with unstructured content from the entire indexed web. The tool then summarises a clear, concise narrative for each risk category: political exposure, sanctions exposure, financial crimes, fraud, corruption, legal disputes and more.

This dual-data approach leads to a more accurate and complete risk assessment compared to traditional providers, who often rely on either structured or unstructured data alone. To truly understand a subject’s risk profile, both data types are essential. By automating these processes, compliance teams can access deeper insights in less time, improving decision-making and reducing the risk of missing critical information.

The key scoring criteria Xapien surpassed

Functionality

Xapien was scored on its depth of functionality, particularly its orchestration of different AI models that work together to produce comprehensive research reports. The tool was also recognised for its ability to surface a wide spectrum of risks. In under 20 minutes, Xapien can generate a detailed report identifying risks related to Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Anti-Bribery and Corruption (ABAC), and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors. 

Chartis analysts also commended Xapien’s ability to recognise associations and connections that traditional manual search methods might miss, such as buried images or references found deep within articles. By thoroughly searching the entire indexed internet through a broad lens, Xapien ensures that every trace of risk is flagged.

Core technology

Chartis praised what sits at the core of the platform: proprietary machine learning techniques that extract and summarise relevant information for compliance professionals. Notably, combining real-time data on politically exposed persons (PEPs), sanctions, and watchlists from leading providers and official registries with contextual information from open sources to establish a clear narrative for each risk area—including political exposure, sanctions exposure, financial crimes, fraud, corruption, legal disputes, and ESG factors. 

A key strength noted by the analysts is Xapien’s ability to accurately distinguish between individuals and entities with similar names. In open web searches, results often include irrelevant information related to others with the same or similar names, which can complicate investigations. Xapien overcomes this with its proprietary disambiguation engine, which uses custom data sets and machine learning models to accurately distinguish between similar names and entities. This is underpinned by a neural network that processes and filters information, ensuring only the most relevant information is summarised. As a result, analysts are no longer stuck in the rabbit hole of sorting through millions of irrelevant search results, so they can focus on their core work. 

Market presence

Xapien was recognised for its significant growth and customer acquisition in key sectors such as law firms, corporates, and financial services. What really impressed the analysts was our co-development partnership with Pinsent Masons, which is set to revolutionise client onboarding processes for AML compliance and KYC due diligence. 

This collaboration leverages our advanced NLP and disambiguation technologies to tackle challenges in the compliance landscape, such as rising costs and slow onboarding times. By streamlining these processes, Xapien transforms how firms manage compliance, enabling them to reallocate resources effectively and focus on high-risk areas. 

The analysts also recognised how we’ve formed partnerships with key players like Dow Jones and leading risk consultancies, expanding our footprint in the risk and compliance market.

Innovation

Our commitment to innovation was recognised, particularly our market-leading capabilities in identifying beneficial ownership structures and conducting legal entity searches. This enables firms to choose between running a pure regulatory risk report on a specific legal entity or a wider reputational risk report that assesses the overall brand.

The current development of customisable Xapien reports also contributed to our ranking. These reports will allow firms to build their own templates, ensuring a consistent, repeatable report format that answers the same questions in the same way every time while being customised to their specific use cases.

Recognition in Financial Crime and Compliance 50 2024

We also ranked number 33 in Chartis’s Financial Crime and Compliance 50 2024 report and won the Entity Management award earlier this year. This placed us among industry giants like LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Moody’s, and Oracle. A key focus for Chartis analysts was how we’re disrupting the traditional billion-dollar compliance market, which has been burdened by manual and fragmented processes. They recognised that we’re setting a new standard for financial crime investigation support as the only AI tool that uses both structured and unstructured data from the entire indexed internet.

Try Xapien for yourself

Book a demo with the team to see why Xapien is recognised year after year as a leading AI-powered due diligence tool for risk and compliance teams.