SEON Acquires Complytron To Step-Up Money Laundering Fight

U.K. fraud prevention firm SEON has purchased anti-money laundering specialist Complytron.

The acquisition, announced in a Monday news release provided to PYMNTS, is designed to create a combined fraud, anti-money laundering (AML) and financial crime prevention platform.

The deal was in direct response to “an urgent demand for robust AML solutions, as the world adjusts to an increasingly volatile political and humanitarian landscape,” SEON said in the news release. “This shift is clearly underlined by a global surge in AML fines, which rose by 50% in the past year alone.”

SEON says the combined platform will help governments and businesses monitor transactions in real time to ferret out signs of money laundering and fraud. It also provides onboarding checks to minimize false positives and improve the experience of legitimate transactors.

Oliver Lebhardt, co-founder and CEO of Complytron, said the deal “will help sectors such as FinTech, online lending, gaming, neobanking, eCommerce and travel, to prevent criminal activity via their platforms.”

Under the terms of the deal, Lebhardt will become the product manager for AML at SEON.

And Tamas Kadar, SEON’s co-founder and CEO, said the acquisition – which follows his company’s $94 million Series B last year – made more sense than having SEON build its own AML tool.

“By completing this acquisition, we have increased our total addressable market by approximately $6 billion,” said Kadar. “This means we are instantly able to solve the challenges of risk and compliance management for even more businesses.”

PYMNTS spoke with Kadar last year about the rise in cybercrime across a range of industries and sectors that followed the COVID pandemic.

“What we see today is the highest level of successful fraudulent attacks, more people are being targeted, unfortunately, and cybercriminals are getting cleverer,” Kadar said.

He noted that cybercriminals were getting smarter and discovering loopholes to threaten businesses. The best way to combat these attacks, according to Kadar, is via a multilayered, holistic strategy that engages different cybersecurity providers.

“For almost every type of cybersecurity problem there is a different solution to apply for. It’s very rare to find a [single] provider or out-of-the-box solution which can be applied across all these different problems,” Kadar told PYMNTS.

Meanwhile, recent research by PYMNTS found that a majority of businesses recognize that they need better fraud prevention tools.

The January PYMNTS/nsKnox “B2B Fraud Tracker” found that 71% of companies admit the need for more digital fraud solutions, and 49% say the issue is the most important to their fraud-related concerns.

“Organizations still relying on manual and reactive anti-fraud tools experience slower growth than those using proactive and automated solutions,” PYMNTS wrote last month. “Fraud-related growth limitations can include both direct theft by hackers and other bad actors and revenue loss from limiting the acceptance of new customers.”