2025 marks a major milestone for Bateleur Software – three decades of delivering high-impact software solutions to some of South Africa’s largest enterprises. Since its founding in 1995, Bateleur has built a reputation for innovation, agility and deep technical expertise, especially in the areas of data management and anti-financial crime.
“We’ve always been driven by our clients’ evolving needs,” says CEO and co-founder Sam Selmer-Olsen. “And over the past two decades, one of the most urgent challenges for our customers – particularly in banking and financial services – has been regulatory compliance and the fight against financial crime. That’s where our AML solutions have really come to the fore.”
From consulting roots to AML leadership
Founded by five former SPL colleagues – Selmer-Olsen, Donald Abbot, Martyn Joyce, John Lucas and the late John Steyn – Bateleur Software began as a consulting and system tuning firm. Quickly profitable and operating lean from the start, the company gained traction with high-profile customers from its very first week.
Though Bateleur initially focused on data stability and performance tuning, its product portfolio began to grow organically. A pivotal moment came in the mid-2000s, when the team began working with fuzzy name matching technology from Search Software America (SSA), now Informatica. This capability laid the foundation for what would become a cornerstone of Bateleur’s offering: comprehensive customer screening.
By 2006, Bateleur had developed its first full-fledged customer screening solution, paving the way into the anti-financial crime space. That path would lead to a robust partnership with Swiss-based IMTF’s Siron product suite, a globally trusted name in AML software, with Bateleur becoming the official representative for Siron across sub-Saharan Africa.
Delivering end-to-end AML solutions
Today, Bateleur’s AML portfolio includes end-to-end solutions covering:
- Customer screening – Advanced name-matching and fuzzy logic to ensure accurate detection of politically exposed persons (PEPs), sanctions and watchlist entities.
- Transaction monitoring – Real-time and batch monitoring to detect suspicious patterns and behaviours.
- Transaction screening – Screening of financial transactions against sanctions and embargo lists before execution.
- Risk assessment – Comprehensive tools for customer and institutional risk scoring, aligned with local and international regulatory standards.
“With increasing regulatory scrutiny and rising financial crime risks, real-time monitoring and AI-driven AML tools are no longer optional,” says Selmer-Olsen. “We’re helping our customers stay ahead of the curve with intelligent, scalable and compliance-ready AML solutions.”
Local expertise, global impact
In addition to AML, Bateleur remains a respected player in the data extraction and replication domain with CCA, Treehouse Software and, more recently, Rocket Software, and with proprietary Bateleur developed tools like eStrip enjoying adoption in markets as diverse as South Africa, Australia, the US, Europe and the UK.
Looking ahead, the company sees exciting opportunities in real-time data synchronisation, leveraging zIIP processors and AI augmented data quality solutions –especially as companies seek to modernise mainframe environments while maintaining compliance and performance.
Trusted partner in compliance and innovation
“Thirty years in, we’re still doing what we set out to do: solve tough problems and deliver exceptional service,” says Selmer-Olsen. “We may be small in size, but the complexity of the databases we work on and the calibre of our clients speak volumes.”
As Bateleur Software steps into its fourth decade, its mission is clear: to empower customers with smart, secure and future-ready solutions – particularly in the critical area of anti-financial crime.
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