Financial crime compliance is undergoing a period of significant transformation. As financial institutions contend with evolving regulatory expectations, increasingly sophisticated criminal activity and growing volumes of customer and transaction data, firms are under pressure to modernise compliance frameworks, improve operational efficiency and strengthen risk detection capabilities. The Global State of RegTech 2026 report – authored by RegTech Analyst and Parker & Lawrence Research – explored the shifting sands of financial crime compliance, and where the biggest changes are occuring across the wider financial services market.
As part of the research for the report, Parker & Lawrence Research interviewed market leaders in the space on how they are tackling the industry’s most pressing financial crime compliance challenges hampering the sector today.
On this occasion, the firm spoke with Vineet Mishra, CPO of Velocity FSS, provider of a modular financial crime platform combining AML, fraud, data tools, workflow and AI-assisted investigation. In the report, Velocity was recognised for its entity resolution, country resolution and data normalisation offerings as well as its recognition that monitoring is only as good as the data underneath it.
This interview was part of the wider Global State of RegTech report conducted by RegTech Analyst and Parker Lawrence Research. To download the full report, click here.
More than a third of financial institutions are still at the earliest stages of deploying financial crime technology — operating with fragmented systems, incomplete tooling, or nothing meaningful in place at all. For an industry facing tightening regulatory scrutiny, that is not a minor gap. It is a structural vulnerability.
The financial crime compliance technology market has long been shaped around the requirements of large institutions. Tier-one banks with dedicated compliance teams, deep IT budgets and established vendor relationships have been well served. The rest of the market — community banks, credit unions and FinTechs that service money services businesses — have largely been left to assemble their own solutions from point products, manual workflows and legacy infrastructure never designed for the task.
The compliance obligations, however, are the same regardless of institution size. Transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, suspicious activity report filing and the ability to demonstrate a defensible programme at examination: these requirements do not scale down to match a smaller firm’s resources. The result is an environment where regulatory expectations have risen steadily while accessible, purpose-built technology has lagged considerably behind.
The problem with siloed controls
At most institutions, anti-money laundering and fraud controls are still managed separately — different teams, different alert queues, different systems. That separation may once have made administrative sense, but the operational reality of modern financial crime has made it a liability. Scam proceeds require laundering. Mule accounts straddle fraud and AML typologies. When teams are working from disconnected systems, neither has a complete picture, and the patterns connecting the two disciplines go undetected.
Data quality creates a second layer of difficulty. Smaller institutions typically run several legacy systems across core banking, payments and customer records. Transaction data arriving from cross-border payments or correspondent banking relationships is frequently inconsistent, incomplete or formatted differently across sources. High-risk jurisdiction monitoring depends on accurately resolving where a transaction originated and settled. If that resolution cannot be done reliably, the monitoring logic built on top of it is already compromised before an analyst begins work.
The third challenge is defensibility. Regulators increasingly expect to see how data entered the system, which monitoring rules were applied, why specific alerts were generated and how investigations were conducted. Spreadsheet-based processes and fragmented workflows make it extremely difficult to produce the clear audit trail that examinations now require.
Velocity FSS chief product officer Vineet Mishra said, “There’s a regulatory change that comes in — we immediately jump on it, we fix it, our team is there. We make sure that nothing passes through your system which is not regulatory compliant.”
How Velocity FSS approaches the problem
Velocity FSS has built a cloud-based FinCrime platform that brings AML, fraud and data management together within a single environment, designed specifically for institutions that have historically been underserved by the enterprise compliance software market.
The platform’s foundation is data quality. Rather than leaving data normalisation as a client responsibility to address before the software can function, Velocity addresses it inside the product. Its data tools layer includes entity resolution, country resolution, country risk rating and entity-linkage context — all applied before monitoring logic is executed. For cross-border payments, where transaction data passing across jurisdictions and formats is routinely ambiguous, this country resolution capability is directly relevant to accurate high-risk jurisdiction monitoring. The platform also publishes quarterly AML and counter-terrorist financing country risk ratings across 256 jurisdictions, feeding into onboarding decisions and transaction risk assessment.
On the monitoring side, the AML suite covers sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, case management, customer due diligence and US-specific requirements including FinCEN 314(a). The fraud suite covers payment fraud across wire transfers, electronic payments, cheques, ATM and card activity, as well as employee and insider risk. Operating both within a single workflow environment means analysts working on connected typologies — mule accounts, scam proceeds, cross-domain activity — can draw on the same data and the same case management layer, rather than switching between isolated systems.
Alert triage, assignment, investigation, escalation and supervisory oversight are all managed within the platform. Dashboards display alert volumes, ageing, team productivity and investigation status. Alert ageing is a consistent point of regulatory scrutiny at examination, and the platform’s ability to show where alerts sit, why they are delayed and who owns them directly supports the audit trail regulators now expect.
The platform also includes an AI investigator capability, which compiles case information, produces investigation summaries and presents evidence in a structured report of two to three pages. The analyst retains the final disposition; the AI handles the gathering, organisation and explanation of information. In practice, analysts who might previously work through five to eight AML alerts per day are able to process closer to 15 to 20 with AI-assisted investigation.
Velocity integrates with core banking systems and specialist data providers including CLEAR, LexisNexis Risk Solutions and Signzy, reflecting the reality that no single platform can build every capability required across the full breadth of financial crime compliance internally.
What the results look like in practice
The case for the platform is not theoretical. A US correspondent bank operating under a consent order deployed Velocity across a network of more than 350 respondent banks, combining transaction monitoring, KYC, case management and automated SAR reporting. The deployment delivered a 200% improvement in AML programme efficiency and a successful exit from the consent order within the required timeframe.
There is also a direct revenue dimension. Bankers’ banks and sponsor banks can use Velocity to offer financial crime monitoring as a managed service to FinTechs, MSBs and other banks, repositioning what has historically been a pure compliance cost as a revenue-generating capability.
As regulatory expectations continue to rise for smaller institutions — and as stablecoin monitoring emerges as a new compliance requirement — the case for integrated, data-first AML and fraud management is only strengthening. Velocity FSS is well placed to serve that need.
Read the original post from Parker & Lawrence Research here.
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