Sentinels, a Fenergo company and Europe’s intelligent transaction monitoring platform, has been appointed by payments fintech kevin. “to handle transaction monitoring compliance.”
The relationship means kevin. now “detects suspicious transactions in real-time while ensuring compliance with local anti-money laundering (AML) regulations.”
kevin.’s account-to-account (A2A) payment infrastructure solution, enabled by open banking, allows merchants “to receive payments from more than 350 million people with bank accounts within 27 European countries.”
Currently, over 6000 merchants “use kevin.’s payment infrastructure.”
Its goal is “to improve security and convenience for consumers, and increase conversion, speed up settlement and lower transaction fees for merchants while bypassing card schemes.”
To prevent fraudulent use of its services and meet European AML compliance requirements, kevin. must “maintain strong customer due diligence, transaction monitoring, and client risk profiling procedures.”
These steps “ensure that the company can identify suspicious and deny illegitimate transactions.”
Sentinels equips kevin.’s AML officers “with a modern tool that enables it to meet its regulatory needs and improve transaction monitoring.”
For example, rich client data insights built from Know Your Customer (KYC) and transaction data provide kevin. “with a deeper understanding of its customers, enabling it to identify suspicious transactions with greater speed, frequency and accuracy.”
Joost van Houten, CEO of Sentinels, commented:
“It’s a privilege to have another open banking-powered fintech adopt our transaction monitoring solution. We’re committed to helping kevin. continue its commendable ascent unimpeded by the threat of fraud and money laundering, with increased operational efficiency, and in line with Europe’s compliance requirements. It’s a vital role in kevin.’s journey that we’re thrilled to have been chosen to play.”
Mindaugas Gaulia, Head of Compliance at kevin., added:
“Following a quick onboarding process, we’ve reaped the benefits of the flexible Sentinels platform. Its rules-based alerts are customizable, and the entire workflow is configurable to suit our business needs and the jurisdictions we serve, reducing the time and effort spent on investigations. kevin. has huge growth ambitions for our bank coverage and A2A payments products, and we see Sentinels as our future one-stop-shop compliance partner.”
kevin. has witnessed “a high demand for its services since launching in 2018 and with Sentinels’ support, the company plans to further ride and drive this wave to allow more consumers across the globe to make purchases direct from their bank accounts, cutting out the high costs from the card schemes.”
As noted in the update, Sentinels is “an intelligent transaction monitoring solution dedicated to data-driven compliance for the financial industry.”
With a strong core engineering team having over a decade of experience developing innovative products, Sentinels’ pragmatic-AI approach has “a proven track record in improving compliance outcomes. Its secure cloud-based offering ensures a high level of customer trust and meets dynamic regulatory requirements.”
In April 2022, Sentinels was “acquired by Fenergo, the leading provider of Customer Lifecycle Management technology solutions for financial institutions.”
The acquisition “enables Sentinels to scale rapidly, increase global footprint, and better serve the needs of larger financial institutions.”
As mentioned in the announcement, kevin. was “created to evolve traditional online, card and POS payments.”
kevin.’s Open Banking “enabled account-to-account infrastructure allows payments to move directly from the payer’s bank to a merchant or service provider’s bank, bypassing traditional intermediaries.”
Offering fully customizable transacting solutions which scale to the size of any business, kevin. helps “improve customer experience and thereby conversion, while also saving money on the cost of payments processing.”
Currently, the company “supports over 6000 merchants all across Europe.”