Watching the sunrise from the top of the 30 St Mary Axe, better known as ‘the Gherkin’, Ripjar welcomed more than 60 distinguished guests from around the City of London to celebrate the UK launch last year of our signature financial crime solution that uses advanced AI to monitor the risks of millions of clients in real-time.
The theme of the event, the ‘Global Illumination’ of Financial Crime, which costs the world’s economy up to $2TN per year, and effects the lives of millions both directly and indirectly whether through corruption, bribery, and fraud. Ripjar’s data intelligence platform – Labyrinth – gives analysts the power to automatically illuminate unknown risks and identify hidden links in data in order to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes.
Sir Iain Lobban, former Director of the UK’s signals intelligence agency GCHQ provided the keynote address at the event, drawing parallels from history from the code breaking efforts at Bletchley Park to the modern day challenge of countering global terrorist networks.
The exclusive breakfast briefing covered the development of our data intelligence technology, which combines data fusion, machine learning, visualisation and automation to give organisations the ability to tackle complex and dynamic challenges such as money laundering, terrorism and cybercrime.
We’ve focused on building a platform that can scale to the size of the problem, and the organisations that are at the forefront in countering these types of risks. For example, our client screening capability can screen millions of clients for risks across any data source, whether unstructured news or watchlist data about PEPs and sanctions.
Our technology also includes breakthroughs in name matching against client records. Our machine learning algorithms use secondary characteristics in addition to just names, including variants, abbreviations, dates, places, titles, nationalities, relationships – all of which can all help to resolve identities across siloed datasets and narrow down matches to detect real risk much more quickly than a human could.
To celebrate the London launch, we also commissioned a special bottle of gin, hand-made by the wonderfully talented London-based distillers 58 Gin.
Adorned with one of our favorite Churchill quotes, the bottles were warmly received in preparation for the long hot summer ahead.
“The gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire”
Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
We’re truly excited about sharing our journey with you as we develop our technology and help thwart criminal activities all over the world. Please get in touch at the email address below if you’d like to know more about our unique technology and find out how we can help your institution to counter financial crime.
New York, USA: Ripjar is excited to announce today the launch of a new capability in the global effort to counter financial crime. In the heart of Manhattan, Sir Iain Lobban – former director of the UK’s Intelligence service, GCHQ – provided a keynote address to more than 50 key partners and global thought leaders in financial crime, compliance, anti money-laundering and due diligence.
Ripjar’s new approach to screening client identities presents a step-change for financial institutions; screening in real-time millions of identities for risk against against any data source, including sanctions, PEPs and unstructured data such as negative news/adverse media.
Sir Iain Lobban – former Director of GCHQ provided the keynote address at the event.
Unveiling the new capability, based on Ripjar’s industry-leading Labyrinth data intelligence platform, Jeremy Annis, Ripjar’s CEO said: “Labyrinth is the culmination of all of the knowledge, experiences and careers of everybody at Ripjar. It’s already revolutionising the way that compliance teams are looking at their data, including automating manual effort. It means that computers can be used at what they are good at – crunching through large volumes of data. And then humans can focus on what they are good at – putting risk into context. Ultimately, making decisions.”
“We’ve taken a very different approach compared to traditional search tools” Jeremy Annis said at the event. “We take as much data as we can from world class providers like Dow Jones. We then use machine-learning to spot risk, de-duplicate documents and news articles, and join the dots between all data in any language or script – we’ve taught our algorithms to read the news like a human would”.
Jeremy Annis, CEO of Ripjar – announcing Labyrinth for Financial Crime
Ripjar’s technology employs a number of advanced techniques in the fight against false positives – traditionally a major issue for compliance teams managing risk in large financial institutions. This includes some major innovations that utilise secondary characteristics in addition to just names, including variants, abbreviations, dates, places, titles, nationalities, relationships – all of which can all help to resolve identities across siloed datasets and narrow down matches to detect real risk much more quickly than a human could.
The launch event was supported by two of Ripjar’s global partners, Accenture and Dow Jones. Philippe Guiral, Managing Director for Financial Crime and Yuvaraj Kandasamy from Accenture presented their vision for the Accenture technology ecosystem of which Ripjar is a key part of.
Philippe Guiral, Accenture’s Managing Director for Financial Crime in North America
Situated in the heart of midtown, New York City, the event space was generously provided by Ripjar investors Winton Group – a global investment management and data science company.
“I’m so pleased to see so many people here and the reaction from the community has just been fantastic” James Mullins, Ripjar’s Global Director of Sales. “This launch represents our commitment to getting our amazing technology into the hands of the people that need it most, and really making a difference to those countering financial crime.”
Labyrinth for Financial Crime Launch Event
About Ripjar
Ripjar is a data intelligence platform company whose mission is to provide global institutions with the most advanced data and analytics solutions to protect themselves in real-time from evolving risks that threaten their growth, prosperity and value.
Founded by former members of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Ripjar develops software products that combine automation, artificial intelligence, and data visualisation to help companies solve the most complex risk and security management problems at scale.
Ripjar was founded in 2012 with a mission to provide corporates and global institutions with the most advanced data and analytics solutions in the fight against cybercrime, money laundering, and terrorism. This important mission requires a truly diverse array of skills from software engineering, data science, business support, relationship management and the analysis and synthesis of new information to detect unknown threats.
Despite this critical need for diversity in thinking and in life experiences to accomplish our task, until 2015 there were no women in our business. Now as we head into 2019, 19% of our workforce are women working across all aspects of our company from business operations, finance, technology and sales; we feel we’re truly moving in the right direction, but there’s so much more we need to do to create a balanced workforce.
One of our biggest challenges is not only attracting women into technology roles but making sure we keep them. We are working hard to stand out as an employer and ensure we create a diverse people-centred culture. To ensure we’re on the right track we have in place well-being initiatives, enhanced maternity and paternity leave and flexible working practices.
So Ripjar is celebrating International Women’s Day with its theme for 2019 – #BalanceforBetter. Creating a gender-balanced world is essential for businesses to thrive, and essential for security and intelligence companies and agencies to tackle the evolving risks that threaten companies, institutions and even the security of our nation. We’re committing to improving balance in every aspect of our operations as we look to the remainder of 2019 and beyond.
Successful careers, bringing up children, fulfilled family lives and, happiness are not mutually exclusive. With the right balance and support, anything is possible.
Kate, Financial Controller
Balance for better is about recognising everyone has valuable skills and qualities regardless of gender, giving everyone a voice leads to a stable and successful workplace and ultimately a better world.
Simon, Technical Delivery Manager
It’s about having that balance between prioritising work and family life, keeping our minds open to different views and perspectives.
Maria, Business Support Director
Being able to balance challenging opportunities at work with ensuring I always have time for the people I care about.
Sandra, Full Stack Engineer/Tech lead
One of the ways I like to balance my life is to dedicate time to focus on ME. I make sure I keep fit, enjoy downtime and ensure I take time to appreciate all those things that help keep me in balance.
Ben, Full Stack Engineer/Tech lead
Founded by former members of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Ripjar develops software products that combine automation, artificial intelligence, and data visualisation to help companies solve the most complex risk and security management problems at scale.
