ThetaRay has named Luis Pinedo as its chief strategic customers officer, a hire aimed at embedding tier-one banking expertise into its platform as regulators worldwide toughen anti-money laundering (AML) oversight.
Pinedo arrives from Santander Bank, where he spent 16 years, most recently as group VP of compliance. During that time he directed the bank’s global financial crime compliance transformation programmes, spanning operating models, processes and technology systems.
At ThetaRay, he will channel lessons from large-scale banking operations into the firm’s product design and development, overseeing both strategic customer engagement and product strategy across the company’s full compliance suite, which covers transaction monitoring, screening, customer risk assessment and agentic investigations.
The move lands at a pivotal moment for the RegTech sector. Supervisors across the globe are intensifying their examination of banks’ AML programmes while rewriting the standards firms must meet. This year, FinCEN has set out plans to assess compliance programmes on their effectiveness, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is embedding generative AI into its own supervisory processes, and the EU AML Package will oblige member states to adopt ownership registry rules under AMLD6. Together, these shifts are pressing financial institutions to adopt tested, institutional-grade AI systems.
ThetaRay builds AI infrastructure for financial crime compliance, with technology that already monitors more than $20tn in transactions each year for leading financial institutions. The company said Pinedo’s appointment underlines its ambition to offer a unified, cross-functional compliance platform that removes long-standing operational silos and sharpens risk reporting so firms can demonstrate effectiveness to today’s examiners.
ThetaRay chief strategic customers officer Luis Pinedo said, “After many years working inside a global bank, I believe financial crime compliance is reaching an inflection point. Traditional rules-based approaches are no longer sufficient as regulators themselves become heavily data-led.
“I joined ThetaRay because AI has been part of the company’s DNA for more than a decade. The use of LLM-based agents is a natural evolution of that journey, and I want to help shape the company’s path to helping banks make that transition in a practical, scalable way.”
ThetaRay CEO Brad Levy added, “To combat sophisticated financial crime at scale, and meet new effectiveness standards of global regulators, technology solutions must be proven in production.
“Luis has spent nearly two decades inside one of the world’s largest banking institutions, spearheading the exact enterprise transformations our clients require to satisfy global regulators. His domain expertise will strengthen ThetaRay’s foundational AI infrastructure, which already monitors over $20 trillion in transactions annually of the world’s leading financial institutions.”
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