Luc Meurant (Neterium) : The API-Native regtech, from ‘Little Thumb' to global leader.
Neterium is characterized as an innovative API-native company reinventing Financial Crime Prevention and responding to the explosion of market demand for highly performant, scalable, and efficient watchlist screening. Neterium’s ambition is to become the global leader in sanction screening technology.
Can you present your company in a few words?
Neterium was founded in 2017 by a team having 100-year combined expertise in Financial Crime Compliance Technology. Since its inception, it has pursued a narrow yet bold objective: designing and operating the most advanced technology solutions for watchlist screening. Neterium’s exclusive focus is to help banks, Fintechs, and digital platforms perform watchlist screening through our real-time Application Programming Interface (API). Neterium offers two different solutions, both powered by the same core engine and exclusively offered through real-time API, covering essentially two use cases: Know-Your-Counterparty (i.e., onboarding and continuous monitoring of clients, suppliers, partners, etc.) and Transaction screening (e.g., payments, securities, trade).
“Neterium’s ambition is to become the market leader in watchlist screening technology, focusing on the most demanding financial institutions, digital platforms and fintechs.”
What are the main trends that influence your activity?
Financial Crime Compliance represents a massive challenge. Indeed, today 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, and a lot of friction is created for the customers. So the first thing that influences our business at Neterium is to address the "effectiveness gap" to close the massive disparity between what financial crime compliance costs to the industry and its relative ineffectiveness in combating money laundering and illicit transactions. Second, the payments market has changed dramatically with the emergence of new instruments (e.g. instant payments) and players (e.g. fintechs, platforms) and an explosion of the payments volumes. Legacy solutions are ill-suited to address these challenges while our solutions offer the required scalability, efficiency, flexibility and latency.
How does your company adapt to these new developments?
2022 marks a turning point for the industry. First of all, the complexity of the sanctions environment has grown significantly. Indeed, overall, sanctions are enacted faster, more targeted, and more complex to implement. Neterium has been developing technical solutions that meet these challenges of precision, agility, flexibility, and performance. And then the acceleration of digitalization has led to an exponential increase in transaction volumes. APIs and cloud technologies, embraced since the beginning by Neterium, have proven to be the way to go. Legacy solutions built on old technical architectures do not have the scalability, responsiveness, and reliability to process hundreds of millions of transactions or names in real-time. Good solutions always take their inspiration from user insights. Neterium is committed to building an open, engaged, diverse, and powerful Neterium users community, allowing the product roadmap to be guided by user feedback and experience.