PortX, Hummingbird Partner to Fight Financial Crime

PortX, an integration technology company for financial institutions (FIs), has teamed with compliance platform Hummingbird.

The collaboration is designed to make it easier for FIs to use Hummingbird’s compliance platform for anti-money laundering and financial crime investigations, the two companies said in a Tuesday (Feb. 6) press release.

“With this partnership, any flags in the system for suspicious activities can be automatically pushed to Hummingbird,” said David Wexler, CEO of PortX. “This not only streamlines the process but also drastically reduces response times. It enhances the ability of FIs to promptly address and get ahead of potential issues, improving their overall risk management and compliance posture significantly.”

Added Joe Robinson, CEO of Hummingbird: “By partnering with PortX, we’re able to bring top-tier data integration capabilities directly to our compliance investigations platform. It’s a partnership that allows us to provide financial institutions with the most modern, nimble, and powerful compliance tools on the market — exactly what you need if you’re working to combat financial crime more effectively.”

As PYMNTS wrote last month, collaborations such as these might be the best defense against fraud and other forms of financial crime.

PYMNTS Intelligence data shows that roughly one-third of Big Tech and FinTech firms have suffered fraud in recent months. And joint PYMNTS/Hawk AI research found that about 43% of FIs in the U.S. saw an increase in fraud in 2023 relative to the proper year, resulting in a rise in fraud losses jumping about 65% from $2.3 million in 2022 to $3.8 million in 2023.

And the Faster Payments Council, in a bulletin released late last month, noted the growth in authorized payment fraud, a term for when authorized parties and account holders are duped into sending payments to fraudsters.

Meanwhile, our research showed that 63% of finance chiefs surveyed said they used some level of specialized automation for fraud prevention in the last six months.

“There’s been an increasing awareness of the value of using technologies to wage the war against the fraudsters,” PYMNTS wrote. “Since the dark days of the pandemic, disruptions and the shift to digital channels as a chief way of conducting business resulted in 56% of companies investing in more robust fraud defenses.”