Curve automated their operations and reduced hit rates.

The Company

Curve is a banking platform that consolidates multiple cards and accounts into one smart card and app. Curve was founded in 2015 with a mission to simplify and unify the way people spend, send, see and save money, and the company has an ambitious goal to create a connected world of money that is tailored individually to each customer.

Industry: Payments FinTech
Products: AML Screening and Ongoing Monitoring — Sanctions and PEPs

The Challenge

Curve was conducting manual checks for sanctions and PEPs, which were slow and time-consuming, impacting their onboarding efficiency and customer experience. Curve was, therefore, looking for a more scalable AML solution that could help them reduce the pain of onboarding new customers and ensure they fulfill their regulatory requirements.

Objectives

Curve was initially looking to automate the screening process for new customers and reduce the volume of alerts to speed up onboarding time. The company wanted a solution that balanced protecting the business from financial crime with fulfilling their customers’ expectation that the onboarding process would be quick, easy and able to be done via their smartphone.

Since Curve started working with ComplyAdvantage in 2017, the company has experienced rapid growth, which, given the large volume of customer applications, has made this objective even more important to the business. In just two years, Curve’s customer base has grown to over a million customers, which means that having a tool that is highly configurable, flexible and scalable is paramount.

The Solution

Curve was rapidly increasing its global operations, so what differentiated ComplyAdvantage from competing providers was the ability to deliver real-time alerts across different jurisdictions through the use of a two-way API for straight-through processing.

The customer success team at ComplyAdvantage visited Curve in August 2019 to look into reducing Curve’s hit rates and false positives. The team started by diving deep into possible causes and invested time in training Curve’s personnel so they could get the most use out of the tool. ComplyAdvantage started sending through an extra parameter country code for PEPs, which allowed Curve to be more targeted in their screening approach, and cleaned up legacy data, which had been causing a higher volume of false positives. ComplyAdvantage then came up with suggestions around how to reduce Curve’s hit rate, allowing them to only focus on the lists that mattered to their business.

These proactive insights, combined with guidance around how to configure their risk-based approach, allowed ComplyAdvantage and Curve to establish a strong partnership based on trust in the team and the data provided.

The Outcome

Curve was able to automate their operations and reduce their team’s manual efforts by reducing hit rates from 3.5% in January 2019 to 0.91% by January 2020. This allowed Curve to speed up the onboarding process while also ensuring full compliance to AML/CFT regulations. To support their growth, Curve has recently decided to upgrade the entity screening capacity by several million entities, allowing their team to remain the same size despite the increasing volumes.