Financial crime doesn’t happen in isolation. It thrives in the spaces between systems, in the misalignment between fraud detection, anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) protocols. While many financial institutions continue to treat these areas as separate disciplines, the criminals they’re trying to catch do not. “Fraudsters find the cracks between disconnected systems,” says Barrie Venter, Sybrin’s product lead for KYC, fraud risk management and identity verification. “It’s in those blind spots that they wiggle their way in.” The traditional approach of managing fraud, AML and KYC in separate systems has become a liability. Duplicate alerts, wasted effort and inconsistent decisions slow down investigations and frustrate regulators. “Disconnected teams are often looking at the same customer through different lenses,” adds Venter, “and that leads to alerts that lack context and overwhelm compliance teams.”
Better data, sharper insight
Unified platforms are designed to solve this. By merging fraud, AML and KYC data into one environment, organisations can gain a more complete view of customer risk. “You can reduce false positives and improve reporting quality,” Venter explains. “Once you start overlaying signals across all three areas, you can prioritise the right alerts and detect suspicious activity much earlier.” A single risk score, generated from multiple compliance inputs, brings consistency to internal decision-making and external reporting. “Instead of trying to stitch together a suspicious activity report from three different systems, you’re pulling everything from one place,” he says. “It’s cleaner, more accurate and much easier to defend in an audit.” This integrated approach supports both real-time and batch processing, giving institutions the flexibility to align compliance workflows to the nature of the risk. By centralising operations and reducing duplication, businesses can close the investigative gaps that criminals often exploit.
Agility through low-code design
Financial crime evolves quickly and so do regulatory requirements. Institutions need to respond in real-time. This is why low-code platforms have a distinct advantage. “In the past, it could take months to update a compliance system,” says Venter. “By then, the damage was already done. Low-code makes it possible to act fast. You can plug in a new data source or test a vendor in real-time. That agility is essential.” This adaptability is especially useful when new fraud patterns emerge. With low-code tools, compliance teams can quickly change workflows, add checks or reroute certain customers through multiple identity providers. “Sometimes you want to run high-risk customers through two different data sets to make sure nothing is missed,” he adds. “Low-code allows you to do that quickly without rebuilding your system.” Sybrin’s low-code framework also supports role-based access control and prebuilt audit trails, making it easier to ensure regulatory adherence without introducing additional complexity. The architecture is modular and scalable, which means organisations can add functionality without overhauling the core system.
AI across the chain
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are enhancing every part of the compliance life cycle. In fraud detection, real-time anomaly spotting, behavioural analytics and adaptive learning are making rules-based models feel obsolete. “Adaptive learning lets the model close gaps without human intervention,” continues Venter. “It reacts to what’s happening now.” AML benefits from advanced pattern recognition, graph analytics and better alert prioritisation, which reduce the number of manual reviews. KYC now includes more advanced biometrics, liveness detection and machine learning-powered risk scoring. Even sanctions screening is evolving. “We’re moving from basic name matching to natural language processing,” he says. “The tech is more accurate and far more responsive.” Transaction monitoring has also improved – alerts are contextualised and supported by automated narratives that help investigators understand what triggered them and why it matters. Generative AI is increasingly being used to draft initial summaries and suspicious activity reports, helping compliance teams respond faster without compromising quality.
Fixing the fragmentation
Despite the technology available, many businesses still struggle to unify their systems. Legacy infrastructure, incompatible data models and organisational silos create barriers. “You’ll get an alert that touches both AML and fraud, and then no one knows who owns it,” explains Venter, “but you don’t have time to argue about ownership when you’re fighting financial crime.” Sybrin’s approach removes those barriers by bringing everything into a centralised platform. A common data model reduces the cost and complexity of integration. Real-time and batch processing are supported, depending on the risk scenario. And a strong case management layer ensures different teams can collaborate on a single record without duplicating work. “That’s how you close blind spots,” he says. Identity verification sits at the core of Sybrin’s compliance strategy. The platform supports multiple channels, including mobile, web, USSD and assisted onboarding journeys. “In markets like Africa, onboarding often starts as an assisted journey but eventually becomes self-service,” Venter adds. “We build for that transition.”
Sybrin’s tools are built to adapt across jurisdictions, whether that means aligning with South Africa’s FICA requirements, Kenya’s FRC mandates or the Philippines' AMLA. This ensures compliance frameworks remain responsive to the legal context in each operating region. Compliance modernisation is more than upgrading systems. “It’s a shift from reactive to intelligent,” ends Venter. “From static rules to dynamic response, from siloed tools to unified protection. And in a world where risk doesn’t wait, your compliance platform shouldn’t either.”
Share