Aresbank, a specialist corporate bank headquartered in Madrid that finances trade between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, is replacing labour-intensive anti-money laundering (AML) controls with SymphonyAI‘s transaction monitoring platform for trade finance and correspondent banking.
The bank will deploy SymphonyAI’s monitoring technology as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, moving away from partly manual processes that require significant operational resources. Once live, the system will cover several billion euros in monthly correspondent banking activity, alongside transaction monitoring across Aresbank’s trade finance book.
The move comes as financial institutions face continued scrutiny over trade flows, with sanctions evasion and trade-based money laundering among key concerns. Correspondent banking also presents a distinct risk profile, while Aresbank’s business spans documentary credits, international guarantees, correspondent banking and multi-currency credit lines connecting European and MENA markets.
Aresbank said the deployment will help improve consistency and transparency across its financial crime operations, strengthen its readiness for regulatory reviews and provide greater oversight as its trade finance and correspondent banking volumes grow.
The bank also expects the technology to reduce time spent on manual reviews and accelerate trade finance processing. It said the platform will allow it to respond to new regulations and transaction types without requiring a complete replacement of its compliance infrastructure.
SymphonyAI’s financial services division provides software for financial crime detection, risk management and compliance. Its platform supports financial institutions across retail, commercial and correspondent banking.
The deployment highlights the different requirements involved in monitoring trade finance compared with retail banking. While retail AML systems may focus heavily on transaction values, frequency and customer activity, trade finance monitoring requires firms to assess documentation, counterparties, jurisdictions and the underlying trade associated with instruments such as guarantees and letters of credit.
Aresbank therefore selected a platform designed to support correspondent banking and trade finance rather than adapting a retail-focused monitoring system. The deal also expands SymphonyAI’s presence in the Iberian market.
Isabel Tobares, head of compliance and global risk control at Aresbank, said, “Our controls were only partially automated and operationally intensive, and they could no longer keep pace with the oversight our regulators expect across trade finance and correspondent banking. The future of AML is not about doing more controls. It’s about making our controls smarter through automation, data, and technology. SymphonyAI gives us a platform built for our business, not a retail template, and one we can scale as our compliance requirements evolve.”
John Edison, president of financial services at SymphonyAI, added, “Aresbank’s business doesn’t look like a typical retail bank, and that’s exactly the point. Our platform is built to support the full range of banking business models, from correspondent banking to trade finance, not just retail compliance. For Aresbank, that meant combining detection rules from both our retail and correspondent banking models into a single solution, then tuning it to reflect the bank’s role as a bridge for trade between Europe and North Africa. This deployment deepens our presence in Iberia and shows how the same financial crime platform trusted by many of the region’s largest banks can be adapted to a specialized institution with a very different risk profile.”
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