David Lomiashvili, CEO and co-founder of Identomat, on identity, automation and the future of financial crime prevention.
Financial crime rarely arrives neatly labelled. It tends to emerge in the spaces between systems, in the moments when fragmented processes fail to connect quickly enough. As financial services move further online, those gaps have become more visible and, for criminals, more valuable.
David Lomiashvili, CEO and co-founder of identity verification platform Identomat, has spent much of his career studying exactly where those weaknesses appear. His work in digital identity and financial crime prevention has earned his company recognition in FinTech Global’s FinCrime50, which highlights the most influential innovators shaping the fight against financial crime.
For Lomiashvili, the starting point is not technology but trust. “What first drew me in was the simple fact that trust online was badly broken,” he says.
“Financial institutions were being asked to onboard customers remotely, stay compliant across jurisdictions, stop fraud, and still deliver a decent user experience, all at the same time. Most of the tools on the market treated those as separate problems. We saw them as one system problem.”
That observation eventually led to the founding of Identomat. Lomiashvili and his co-founders focused on a single premise: identity is often where financial crime either stops early or quietly slips through.
“We started from the belief that identity is where a very large share of financial crime either gets stopped early or quietly slips through,” he explains. “If you can verify a real person, a real business, and the real level of risk with high confidence and low friction, everything downstream gets stronger.
“So we built Identomat as an end-to-end, modular platform that brings identity verification, liveness, AML screening, KYB, Video KYC, and transaction monitoring into one operating layer instead of forcing institutions to stitch together a small zoo of vendors.”
The threat landscape is evolving faster
The pressure facing financial institutions has intensified in recent years as criminal tactics evolve alongside new technology. Fraud networks increasingly rely on automation and synthetic identities, probing systems continuously in search of weaknesses.
Lomiashvili sees two forces reshaping the threat landscape at the same time.
“Financial crime is becoming more automated, more synthetic, and more adaptive, while many institutions are still defending themselves with fragmented systems and manual processes,” he says.
“Deepfakes, synthetic identities, mule activity, sanctions risk, and cross-channel fraud do not show up neatly in one place anymore. The signals are distributed, and bad actors don’t have to know where exactly the seams are. Agentic fraud systems can poke and prod in real time to find the vulnerabilities.”
At the same time, internal pressures inside financial institutions continue to grow.
“Institutions are under pressure to move faster, reduce friction, and cut costs, but compliance complexity keeps rising,” he says. “Integration remains hard, legacy infrastructure slows everything down, and too many teams are stuck choosing between customer experience and control.”
That tension, he argues, reflects structural problems in how compliance systems are designed.
“For instance, Liminal’s KYC market research says integration complexity remains a major barrier, while deepfakes and synthetic identities are among the threats institutions feel least prepared for.”
Where traditional systems struggle
Much of the industry’s compliance infrastructure was designed for a slower pace of risk. Periodic reviews and static rule sets worked when threats evolved gradually. That environment has changed.
“Traditional approaches fall short in three places,” Lomiashvili says.
“First, they are too static. They were built for periodic checks, fixed rules, and slower-moving threats. That world is gone.
Today, risk changes continuously, and bad actors move in real time, not quarterly.”
He also points to the complexity created by fragmented compliance stacks.
“One vendor handles document verification, another does watchlist screening, another handles transaction monitoring, and then someone inside the institution is expected to make those pieces behave like one coherent system. Criminals love that setup because gaps between tools are often where the fraud gets through.”
By the time suspicious behaviour is detected, the damage may already be underway.
“Traditional models rely too much on after-the-fact detection. By the time suspicious activity is flagged downstream, the bad actor may already be onboarded, funded, and moving money.”
That is why, he says, prevention must begin earlier and continue throughout the customer lifecycle.
“We think prevention needs to start earlier, at identity, and then continue across the full customer lifecycle with adaptive monitoring rather than one-and-done checks.”
Building a unified platform
Identomat’s approach reflects that lifecycle perspective. Rather than separating identity verification, compliance screening and fraud monitoring into different tools, the company designed its platform to combine those signals.
“What differentiates us is that we do not treat identity, compliance, and fraud as isolated product categories,” Lomiashvili says.
“We built Identomat fully in-house as one platform where biometric liveness, document verification, AML, KYB, Video KYC, address verification, and transaction monitoring can work together and compound risk signals rather than operate in silos.”
Fraud rarely reveals itself through a single signal.
“Fraud rarely announces itself in just one layer,” he says.
Another element of the platform is orchestration. Different users pass through different verification steps depending on their risk profile.
“We are not interested in forcing every user through the same rigid flow,” Lomiashvili explains. “Low-risk users should move fast. Higher-risk or higher-value cases should escalate intelligently.”
That escalation may involve stronger liveness checks, additional identity verification or video-based verification.
“We also built the stack for real regulated environments, not just demo flows. Institutions need strong liveness performance, global ID coverage, flexible workflows and deployment options ranging from cloud to hybrid or on-prem.”
A demanding market
Developing technology in the financial crime space brings its own challenges. The bar is high, the sales cycles are long, and institutions demand reliability from the outset.
“The toughest challenge is that you are building in a market where the bar is high, the sales cycles are long, the stakes are real, and the problem keeps moving,” Lomiashvili says.
Meeting those expectations requires multiple capabilities at once.
“You have to deliver accuracy, compliance strength, enterprise reliability, explainability, auditability, integration and a smooth user experience all at once.”
Maintaining focus can also be difficult as institutions request broader solutions.
“The market keeps pulling you in many directions because the need is so broad,” he says.
“Our answer has been to stay modular, keep the platform coherent and expand around a strong core of digital identity trust.”
The next phase of financial crime prevention
Looking ahead, Lomiashvili expects financial crime prevention to become more continuous and data-driven.
“Over the next five years, financial crime prevention will become more continuous, more intelligent, more collaborative and more infrastructure-like,” he says.
Static onboarding checks will gradually give way to ongoing monitoring.
“The market is clearly moving toward perpetual KYC, ongoing monitoring and more dynamic risk models.”
Those systems will need to combine multiple signals simultaneously.
“Institutions will need systems that can combine identity, behaviour, transaction activity, regulatory context and trust services data in real time.”
For Identomat, that direction shapes the platform’s roadmap.
“Our goal is to keep strengthening the bridge between highassurance onboarding and downstream risk monitoring, expand KYB and KYT capabilities and deepen adaptive orchestration.”
Lomiashvili ends with a brief message for those attempting to exploit financial systems.
“It’s true that your toolkit is improving,” he says. “But so is ours.” For many years, financial crime relied on institutional fragmentation.
“For a long time, too much of financial crime depended on institutions being fragmented, slow, and forced to operate with partial visibility.”
That environment is changing. “The distance between onboarding, monitoring and enforcement is shrinking.”
His conclusion is simple.
“The gaps you relied on are closing. And we intend to help close them faster.”
Identomat was recently named in this year’s FinCrimeTech50, which identifies the companies leading tech companies fighting money laundering, fraud and financial crime in financial services. The full FinCrimeTech50, including profiles on each company, can be found here.
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