Micheal Sheehy0:02
2022 is a whole different world. Human trafficking, counterfeit goods, drug smuggling, you know, general money laundering. Recently we've seen spikes in, as an industry, related to COVID scams, PPE scams, loan scams where people are defrauding finance institutions to get COVID loans, or selling PPE equipment that doesn't exist.
My name is Micheal Sheehy. I am the chief compliance officer of Payoneer. We are a regulated financial services institution, regulated in multiple jurisdictions all over the world. So, we've really had to adapt our compliance program to look at those new typologies. Coming with COVID and the war in the Ukraine, we see further exposure to financial crime. We operate in what we call a non-face-to-face environment. It's a lot more challenging to mitigate those risks associated with those products. We have over 220 banking partners. So, we have to have a top-class compliance program.
Thetaray have been very open to us with a lot of ideas and actually proactively reached out to us and was like, 'No idea's too big or too small.' One of the key factors around our decision making process was how quickly can we make changes to the system. The key was around flexibility. We still operate like a startup. My compliance program needs to be agile and quick to respond to whatever the business or the product teams are coming up with.
Historically, we just have this static book of rules that you would just have in your transaction monitoring system and the incorporation of the added layer of machine learning and AI will enable us to adapt and respond to our models and risks a lot faster. Machine learning was a very important element for us in this space that we operate in and it was one of the capabilities that we assessed a lot of vendors on.
We'd looked a lot at everyone's machine learning and how it works, but we were super impressed when we went through our proof of concept with Thetaray's Sonar product, when we sent them data from our customers where we actually manipulated that we wanted to see if it would detect certain things and we really pushed it and we were very surprised and happy with the results and that was something that really swung it for us.
And that's one of the biggest shifts with machine learning is that you move away from treating every customer, every use-case exactly the same, just threshold-based to really analyzing, does this fit the profile of your risk, what your customer's doing, and you can really, like, segment and analyze that data, and then adjust your model. And that enables us to adapt and move quickly.
We knew that Payoneer is quite unique in a lot of its flows and a lot of its customer use-cases. I think what Thetaray set apart for us was the collaboration on the relationship. They very much wanted to be a partner with us and not a vendor.
We're able to maneuver their system in a very efficient and speedy manner to meet our needs effectively so that we can really focus on the things that we really need to focus on.
