Arctic Intelligence was founded to address a persistent weakness in financial crime compliance: the reliance on fragmented, manual processes to deliver business-wide risk assessments. According to Anthony Quinn, CEO of the firm, spreadsheets and document-based workflows not only slow assessments down, but also undermine consistency, auditability and enterprise-wide visibility.
To overcome this, Arctic Intelligence embeds advanced analytics and automation directly into its Risk Assessment Platform (RAP). The platform combines structured workflows, automated data aggregation, audit trails and analytics to simplify complex assessments while improving accuracy and transparency across the organisation.
Quinn said, “RAP helps organisations identify and compare risks consistently across countries, legal entities, operating divisions, business units, products and jurisdictions. Our proprietary risk calculation engine aggregates data across risk indicators, risk factors, risk categories and risk groups, applying weighting (where used) to calculate the inherent, control effectiveness and residual risk rating to define the risk landscape of a particular assessment unit, which, when combined across other assessment units, provides an enterprise-view of risks and control effectiveness instantly.”
Through replacing manual processes with a structured, data-driven system, Arctic Intelligence is able to help organisations shift away from subjective interpretation towards a more defensible and auditable approach to financial crime risk management.
By replacing spreadsheets and manual processes with structured, data-driven systems, Quinn outlines that the result is that the firm helps organisations gain a complete and auditable view of their financial crime risk exposures and a clear view on the design and operational effectiveness of their control framework. “It’s all about raising the bar on financial crime risk management in an accessible and affordable way,” said Quinn.
Tough challenges for FinTech
Sectors such as FinTech and digital banking face some tough challenges in financial crime risk management, claims Quinn.
He explained, “They operate across multiple jurisdictions with fast-changing regulations, making consistency and transparency difficult to maintain. Recognising that many FinTech businesses are not as established or mature as some financial institutions, we’ve developed a suite of financial crime risk and control modules for FinTechs, Virtual Asset Service Providers and 20 other industry sectors, to help regulated businesses in these sectors to strengthen their business-wide risk assessments.”
Each of these models includes an enterprise-wide ML/TF/PF risk model with hundreds of risk indicators across environmental, customer, product and service, transaction, channel, country, and industry red flags. It also includes a product and services risk model, which contains relevant regulated products and services by sector and including inherent risk indicators that are specifically relevant to each.
Also included is a channel risk model, which enables the assessment of channel risk across various face-to-face and non-face-to-face distribution channels. Alongside this is a country risk model, which involves regular updates of country risk for 240 countries across over 15 industry-recognisable sources.
Finally, Quinn details that the models contain a comprehensive controls library. “This contains hundreds of suggested controls and control tests, designed to support risk mitigation and the evaluation of design and operational effectiveness of controls,” he said.
Quinn commented, “These risk and control models are designed to help compliance teams assess exposure, standardise controls and report in line with global expectations, even as new regulations emerge.
“By making professional-grade risk management accessible and affordable, we enable these high-growth industries to build compliance foundations that scale with them, rather than holding them back.”
Leveraging automation
While all organisations face financial crime risk, their ability to manage it varies significantly depending on size, complexity and resources. Arctic Intelligence has structured its financial crime risk assessment platforms to address this imbalance, enabling both small and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises to produce consistent, defensible risk assessments.
For SMEs, the AML Accelerate Platform is designed to remove complexity from risk assessments and AML/CTF programme development. Through guided workflows and intuitive design, the platform allows smaller organisations to meet regulatory obligations without the need for large or highly specialised compliance teams.
Larger enterprises, by contrast, require deeper configurability and enterprise-wide visibility. Arctic Intelligence’s Risk Assessment Platform provides full control over risk assessment methodologies, risk models and control assessments, while enabling real-time reporting across multiple entities and jurisdictions. This delivers a consolidated view of financial crime exposure at the group level, while still allowing risk to be assessed at a granular level.
The platform’s modular design allows organisations to deploy out-of-the-box frameworks or tailor them to their own risk management structures. In addition, pre-built ML/TF/PF risk and control libraries covering more than 20 industry sectors help regulated firms accelerate their assessments and strengthen their ability to identify, assess, mitigate and manage financial crime risks.
This balance between scalability and simplicity underpins Arctic Intelligence’s approach – supporting organisations of all sizes with accessible technology that strengthens financial crime risk management without unnecessary complexity.
Important features
For Quinn, real-time monitoring requires a fundamental shift in how organisations think about business-wide risk reporting. “Real-time monitoring is only possible when risk reporting stops being a periodic document exercise and becomes a continuously refreshed data product,” he says.
Within Arctic Intelligence’s Risk Assessment Platform, that transition starts with a single, enterprise-wide financial crime risk model designed to standardise taxonomy across the organisation. By aligning risk groups, categories, factors, indicators and controls, the platform ensures that “every team is measuring risk and control effectiveness in a consistent way,” regardless of geography or business line.
This structure is reinforced through automation. When standardised risk models are paired with automated workflows—covering reviews, approvals, control testing, action tracking and audit trails—organisations can move away from fragmented manual processes. As Quinn puts it, the shift is from “collect and reconcile” to “capture once, reuse everywhere,” removing the re-keying and subjective interpretation that often introduce delays and inaccuracies.
Speed, however, does not come at the expense of control. Quinn stresses that “accuracy at speed depends on governance-grade features,” including role-based access, maker-checker approvals, version control, audit trails and defensible evidence capture. These controls ensure that real-time reporting remains structured, auditable and regulator-ready, rather than uncontrolled or opaque.
Deployment is further accelerated through Arctic Intelligence’s pre-built risk domain content. The platform includes risk libraries, sector modules and indicator sets developed for more than 20 industry sectors, giving organisations a strong starting point while still allowing tailoring to customers, products and services, channels, transactions and countries.
The outcome is business-wide reporting that is both faster and more reliable. With fewer spreadsheet consolidations and less subjective rewriting, organisations gain “a clearer, continuously updated view of inherent risk, control effectiveness and residual exposure,” providing executives, boards and regulators with timely insight whenever it is needed.
Aligned mission
How does Arctic Intelligence’s mission align with compliance automation trends to resolve common hurdles in enterprise risk assessments?
Quinn said, “Our mission is to raise the standard of financial crime risk management globally by transforming risk assessments through innovation, accessibility and consistency. The growing trend towards compliance automation aligns perfectly with this goal.”
Both Arctic Intelligence’s AML Accelerate Platform and the Risk Assessment Platform automate core processes such as data collection, validation, scoring and documentation. This, Quinn outlines, ensures transparency and reliability at every step while giving teams more time to focus on higher-value analysis.
He added, “Automation helps us achieve what manual processes can’t: efficiency, scalability and consistency across organisations of all sizes. It’s not about replacing people; it’s about giving them better tools to manage risk intelligently.”
Global recognition
Arctic Intelligence’s approach to automating and strengthening business-wide risk assessments has earned the company consistent recognition across the RegTech and financial crime compliance landscape. The firm has been named in the RegTech100, the FinCrimeTech50 and the Financial Crime and Compliance 50 (FCC50), highlighting its role in advancing technology-driven risk management.
In addition, Arctic Intelligence has been a finalist in the Finnies Awards for Excellence in RegTech and has received acknowledgement from the A-Team Group for its privacy-by-design innovation – an area of growing importance as organisations balance automation, cyber security and data protection requirements.
Quinn remarked, “For us, these achievements are not just accolades. They represent validation of our mission to improve transparency and accountability in financial crime compliance. They reflect the trust our clients and peers place in our technology and our commitment to continuously raising industry standards.”
Adapting to changing times
How does Arctic Intelligence adapt to emerging regulation such as AI oversight, to overcome evolving privacy challenges in risk assessments?
Here, Quinn remarked, “Adapting to emerging regulation, particularly around AI governance, data protection and model oversight requires risk assessment platforms to be designed for change, not static compliance.”
At Arctic Intelligence, its CEO states, this starts with a modular risk architecture that separates regulatory obligations, risk domains, risk models (risk groups, risk categories, risk factors, risk indicators and controls), allowing new requirements to be introduced without re-engineering the entire framework.
“As supervisors clarify expectations around AI transparency, explainability, human oversight and data minimisation, new risk indicators, control tests and assessment questions can be deployed centrally and applied consistently across business units, jurisdictions and products – avoiding fragmented, manual updates,” explained Quinn.
He continued, “Arctic Intelligence is designed so that no personally identifiable information (PII) is required or stored within the platform, risk assessments focus on risk groups, risk categories, risk factors, risk indicators, controls and evidence rather than sensitive customer, account or transaction data at the individualised level.
“Combined with enterprise-grade information security controls and governance, this approach is trusted by hundreds of financial institutions globally to deliver defensible, regulator-ready risk assessments without introducing unnecessary data-privacy or security exposure.”
For Quinn, the philosophy of the business is simple: compliance should never stand still. Through building flexibility and accountability into its systems, Arctic Intelligence is able to help clients stay ahead of risk and regulation trends whilst protecting the integrity of their data and their business.
Keep up with all the latest RegTech news here
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
