Advanced AI solution to enable growing fintech to effectively detect money laundering and sanctions list violations

MFS Africa, the largest digital payments hub in Africa, and ThetaRay, a leading provider of AI-powered transaction monitoring technology, today announced they will collaborate to protect MFS Africa’s growing network of services against financial crimes.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221012005155/en/

MFS and ThetaRay teams collaborate to monitor payments with AI technology. (Photo: Business Wire)

Through the agreement, ThetaRay will provide MFS Africa its SONAR SaaS solution, including AI-powered AML transaction monitoring and sanctions list screening, enabling it to stay a step ahead of complex and emerging financial crime typologies, and increase growth opportunities with a trusted and secure service.

MFS Africa has made significant acquisitions in the past year, acquiring Baxi, a leading super-agency network in Nigeria, and the US-based fintech GTP, a top processor of prepaid cards across the African continent.

“As MFS Africa continues to expand its business across Africa and focuses on enabling new use-cases, ThetaRay’s advanced platform assures the company an efficient and effective solution that can support our increasing payment volumes, while reducing exposure to risk from financial crimes,” said Patrick Gutmann, Managing Director of MFS Africa.

MFS Africa's full-service digital payments network connects over 400 million mobile money wallets, over 200 million bank accounts and over 150,000 agents to enable cross-platform and cross-border payments for remittance companies, mobile network operators, banks, non-bank financial institutions, and global merchants.

“Moving from a rules-based solution to a sophisticated AI platform is a game-changer for compliance, thanks to its new breed of intelligence that drastically reduces false positives and enables us to detect unknown cases,” said Funmi Dele-Giwa, General Counsel and Head of Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) at MFS Africa. “We take our role in safeguarding the integrity of payments systems very seriously, and this partnership with ThetaRay exemplifies our approach to a strong governance and control environment.”

“MFS Africa is leading the fintech revolution in Africa by enabling digital payments that are accessible to connect all people to the financial world,” said Mark Gazit, CEO of ThetaRay. “ThetaRay is thrilled to partner with a forward-thinking company whose strategy is to provide new technology that helps open the financial ecosystem and promote financial and economic inclusion. ThetaRay’s advanced AI enables the trust needed by new financial players to be accepted into the system, helping grow business and revenues.”

SONAR is based on an advanced form of AI called “artificial intelligence intuition” that makes better decisions with no bias or thresholds, offering customers a risk-based approach to effectively identify truly suspicious cases and create a full picture of customer identities including across complex, cross-border transaction paths. This enables the rapid discovery of both known and unknown money laundering threats, with a peerless 95% detection rate and up to 99% reduction in false positives compared to rules-based solutions.

About MFS Africa

At MFS Africa, we believe that making a payment should be as easy as making a phone call. We believe that access is the currency through which Africans can overcome barriers and injustice and render borders insignificant. We give our partners access to a borderless world of opportunities, connecting enterprises, mobile money operators, money transfer operators, banks, non-bank financial institutions, and online and offline merchants to each other and to more than 400 million mobile money wallets, over 200 million bank accounts and over 150 000 agents in over 35 African countries. We enable domestic and cross-border disbursements and collections across our network of networks and work closely with all our partners across the globe to make borders matter less. Watch our video manifesto here.

About ThetaRay:

ThetaRay's AI-powered SONAR transaction monitoring solution, based on “artificial intelligence intuition,” allows banks and fintechs to expand business opportunities and grow revenues through trusted and reliable cross-border payments. The groundbreaking solution also improves customer satisfaction, reduces compliance costs, and increases risk coverage. Financial organizations that rely on highly heterogeneous and complex ecosystems benefit greatly from ThetaRay's unmatchable low false positive and high detection rates.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20221012005155/en/