New Israeli shekel banknotes and coins. Photo: Pixabay.

CTech – Israeli AI and big data analytics company ThetaRay has announced the launching of SONAR, a financial crime prevention solution for cross-border payments. The SaaS solution helps banks, institutions, and businesses increase transfer volumes without the risk of exploitation from terrorist financing, money laundering, and human trafficking by providing full visibility across complex cross-border transaction paths.

“For the first time in the history of cross-border transactions, risk and revenue are no longer a trade-off,” said Mark Gazit, CEO of ThetaRay. “SONAR is the new standard for trusted global transactions, providing an accurate assessment of risk and enabling safe, secure cross-border payments for financial services providers and their partners. Best of all, it can be up and running within days, providing immediate value.”

Today, cross-border payments are crucial and inevitable to help connect local economies across the world with the global financial system. Despite this, there are complications since banks need to operate over multiple currencies, languages, and more. SONAR is designed to help reduce the risks in cross-border payments by using machine-learning algorithms that can reveal suspicious transaction profiles and can be easily deployed with minimal interference on existing systems.

SONAR was developed by mathematics professors Amir Averbuch and Ronald Coifman, and with its ability to detect early signs of illicit activity, users can increase their revenues and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), improve customer service, and more. It expands on ThetaRay’s existing AML (anti-money laundering) solution by unlocking insights from SWIFT traffic and real-time and automated clearing house schemes, enables data ingestion via all formats like RJE, API, and XML, and includes user-friendly APIs.

“What Swift did to the banking world 25 years ago, ThetaRay will do to the banking world in the next 10 years,” said Erel Margalit, JVP founder and chairman, and ThetaRay’s Board Chairman. “Business security and cooperation between countries will be possible when financial cybercriminals are left out of the secure system that ThetaRay has created together with the banks.”

ThetaRay was founded in 2013 and last week raised a $31 million series C round, bringing its total to $91.5 million. It helps banks, financial institutions, cybersecurity divisions, and infrastructure manage risk, discover money laundering schemes, uncover fraud, and expose bad loans.