Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Charlie Delingpole, CEO of ComplyAdvantage (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: It seems like there is one class of accounts or data objects that is rejected out immediately based on heuristics that you have. There is also another body of behavior monitoring and actions based on behavior monitoring. Are these the only two categories or is there any other kind of intervention? 

Charlie Delingpole: That is more within money laundering risk. The key part of finance is the pricing of risk. Just because there is a risk of default or a risk of a claim, it doesn’t mean that you have to abandon that fully. A key part of finance is understanding the risks.

They might say, “Of course, it is high risk, but we are going to put a price on that and serve that niche market.” Fundamentally, the distinction is between entity base and behavioral patterns of anarchists. 

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. How prevalent is the adoption of your technology in the financial institutions at this point? 

Charlie Delingpole: I started the company back in 2014. The reason that I started the company was because I felt that companies were losing the war on financial crime. That is because the underlying data was very poor.

What you saw after 9/11 was that companies were suddenly worried about terrorist attacks. Many people are high-risk within client bases. As a response, you had news organizations like Dow Jones or Reuters who have created databases by doing enhanced intelligence on counterparties.

Fundamentally, it was a team of 400 researchers trying to track 7 billion people in the world. Fast forward to when I came along in 2014. You now had the cloud and the AI, and therefore we didn’t have to rely on research and seemingly archaic mechanisms to track all 7 billion people in the world.

I started the company with the vision of trying to build this graph of every person and company in the world at every risk driven by machine learning. With this, you have much better, broader, deeper, faster, and more objective data with more connections and facts.

This means that the massive costs and risks born by institutions wouldn’t be there. In terms of adoption, we have hundreds of clients all over the world. We have grown quickly both direct and via partners. A lot of companies will use us via a reseller.

We have a lot of the top banking companies, banking call providers, identity platforms, and full platforms users. To get the power of the platform, API came to us directly as well. 

Sramana Mitra: You are following a platform strategy?

Charlie Delingpole: Exactly. Right now, everything is hosted in the cloud, so the more data that we get the more we understand what is happening. We want to be able to function as a terrorist financing alert/nervous system. Clients all over the world are telling us the things that we are missing or things that we should be adding. As we get bigger, we are getting stronger and better at what we do. 

Sramana Mitra: How many independent software vendors have built applications on top of your platform?

Charlie Delingpole: It would be probably around 200 right now. 

Sramana Mitra: Do you charge them in a platform fee model? 

Charlie Delingpole: Exactly. We built a shared piece infrastructure which is used by many companies. I would love to hire another 1,000 engineers to broaden and deepen what we are building. We only have 170 engineers right now. It’s primarily based upon usage. More searches mean more clients that you are monitoring which makes the searches more complex. That is reflected in the price. 

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Charlie Delingpole, CEO of ComplyAdvantage
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