Neterium, the API-native company specializing in the development of innovative financial crime compliance solutions, just turned five years old.
It is, therefore, the perfect moment to reflect on those five years since the company's creation. But which milestones to choose? The early beginnings? The team building momentum? The most important deals signed? The newest tech development? Too easy.
Financial Crime Compliance is a massive challenge. And the recent geopolitical events are now making its importance even more visible to all. Financial Services firms spend over $180.9 billion per year on Financial Crime compliance. Yet less than 1% of global illicit financial flows are prevented, despite all the friction created for end customers.
For the past five years, Neterium has focused on a single and very specific mission: to build a highly performant, scalable and efficient watchlist screening solution that allows clients and partners to achieve excellence in compliance while delivering frictionless service to their endcustomers.
For the past five years, Neterium has focused on a single and very specific mission: build a highly performant, scalable and efficient watchlist screening solution.
In this retrospective on five key dates, discover how Neterium became a winning story.
1. July 2017 - The backpackers of Financial Crime Compliance launch Neterium
Like most startup success stories, it all started with a small team and a clear vision for a problem to solve: addressing the inefficiencies of the watchlist screening processes.
Built and developed by senior industry experts and technology specialists, Neterium's secret sauce lies in its unique, in-depth expertise.
Indeed, 80% of international banking transactions worldwide are screened today by solutions previously developed by Neterium’s founding team.
From the very beginning, Neterium’s founders wanted to design a new, revolutionary watchlist screening technology solution, to address the requirements of the most demanding players and deliver a customer experience 10x better than before.
For the first 30 months, the focus was exclusively on R&D and software development, with a constant obsession to develop the best solution, leveraging the latest technologies (e.g., distributed computing, Machine Learning, scalable infrastructures) and their unique market experience.
2. January 2020 - The first live client: a turning point
Neterium thrived because its mission was crystal clear from the beginning. Its exclusive focus is helping fintechs, banks, and digital platforms perform watchlist screening through its real-time API, for two specific use cases:
- Screening of payments (or other financial transactions) against international Sanctions & Embargo lists, as required by law to fight against terrorism financing and money laundering.
- Onboarding and continuous monitoring of clients or counterparties to comply with sanctions, anti-money laundering and anti-corruption laws as part of the “Know-Your-Customer” (KYC) process
Neterium's solution went live in early 2020 and immediately set a new standard for watchlist screening in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, scalability, speed and explainability. Deloitte Luxembourg was one of Neterium’s first clients, quickly followed by several others.
For the first 30 months, Neterium’s focus was exclusively on R&D and software development, with a constant obsession to develop the best solution, leveraging the latest technologies.
3. June 2021 - The solution: infinitely scalable!
Despite rapidly onboarding new clients, Neterium never rested on its laurels and always strived to further push its solution and technology. Evidence of its ability to address the requirements of the most demanding players came in June 2021.
Conducting a large-scale performance benchmark, Neterium demonstrated its ability to handle very large volumes of transactions or customer data, with record-breaking throughput and latency: 250,000,000 client records screened against sanctions lists in 8 minutes (and in an impressive 83 minutes against PEPs), payments transactions screened at a pace of 60,000 payments per second and with an average latency below 10 milliseconds. Neterium solution is simply 10 times faster and more efficient than any legacy solution.
Jetscan and Jetflow, the two products of Neterium - powered by the same core engine and exclusively offered through their real-time API - proved to be infinitely scalable, extremely efficient, and provide a rich set of analytics to the clients. The solutions are optimized out-of-thebox, so customers can start using them immediately, without any cumbersome configuration or tuning. Moreover, as regulators increasingly expect full transparency, the Neterium engine can always explain why an alert was (or was not) raised.
4. May 2022 – On track for market leadership
Quietly, Neterium’s growth became exponential in 2022. In a matter of weeks, prestigious partnerships were announced with – among others – Refinitiv (an LSEG business), Binance (the world's leading blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency infrastructure provider) and Ion Treasury (a global provider of treasury and risk management solutions for corporations, financial institutions, and central banks).
Neterium solution is 10 times faster and more efficient than any legacy solution.
The first semester of 2022 was also marked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, provoking an unfurling wave of sanctions coordinated between the US, the UK, the European Union and many other countries. The complexity and velocity of these new sanction programs were unprecedented. The expertise of Neterium's team and the hours spent decrypting new regulations as they came in rapid succession allowed the company to be very responsive, assisting clients and partners with implementing their legal obligations as seamlessly as possible.
5. TODAY - 5 years, 15 people: one common objective
After five years, Neterium continues to build on its success by further developing advanced functionalities, fostering key partnerships and integrating with other solutions to benefit its clients and partners, such as Altares, Acuris Risk Intelligence, Cascade Lab, and many more.
The team has already grown from 2 to 15 people and is rapidly expanding while being careful to preserve its authenticity and specificity. Neterium is not a traditional startup: each team member is an expert in his/her domain, with most people having over 15 years of experience in watchlist screening and all driven by a common purpose. The high value of Neterium is delivered by their technology, but it is created by the people behind it.
Neterium’s ambition is clear: becoming the global market leader in watchlist screening technology. We look forward to the next five years to come!
The team has already grown from 2 to 15 people and is rapidly expanding while being careful to preserve its authenticity and specificity.
