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Image credit: Sentinels

London’s B4B Payments, a company that specialises in smart corporate payments and card solutions for businesses, has partnered with Amsterdam-based AI-powered transaction monitoring startup Sentinels.

With this partnership, B4B Payments will support Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance across European markets.

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Provider of card issuing solutions for businesses

Founded in 2006 by Paul Swinton and Rob Anderson, B4B Payments is a fintech company that offers payment processing solutions for businesses to manage expenses, simplify payroll, reimbursements, and offer employee rewards and incentives.

B4B Payments is an Electronic Money Institution in the UK and Lithuania regulated by the FCA and Bank of Lithuania respectively, as well as a Principal Member of Mastercard Europe and a partner of VISA Inc in the USA. With over 1,000 customers and growing, B4B Payments continues to offer flexible and time-saving solutions that eliminate antiquated finance and accounting processes.

The company has increased its reach throughout Europe. B4B Payments Europe is a member of the Federation of Small Businesses, PIF (Prepaid International Forum), Innovate Finance, and the Mayor of London’s International Business Program.

Formerly known as Payment Card Solutions, B4B Payments also manages and operates the re-loadable scrapyard payout solution Bread4Scrap.

Here’s what Sentinels offers

Founded in 2019 by Joost van Houten, Sentinels spun off from Slimmer AI, a Groningen-based B2B AI venture studio. Using AI and machine learning, Sentinels helps fast-growing fintechs, payment service providers, remittance companies, and (challenger) banks manage risk and fulfil their compliance obligations. 

The platform monitors transactions, builds rich behavioural profiles, detects a wide range of suspicious activity, and automatically generates recommended next steps – saving time and effort for compliance teams.

Joost van Houten says, “Never has there been a more critical time for businesses to bolster their transaction monitoring systems. We predict an increased demand for AI-driven risk management services as digital payments rapidly increase and regulators intensify their focus on preventing financial crime.”

Sentinels is ISO 27001 certified and was designed and developed to meet the strictest regulatory requirements in Europe. The company serves a range of clients including Mollie, Terrapay, Online Payment Platform, Ginger Payments, and ManoBank among its roster of clients.

How will this partnership help B4B Payments?

B4B Payments requires a flexible AML solution that meets the monitoring requirements of the company’s diverse product and customer range – which includes both corporate accounts and individual cardholders. The solution must also be scalable to support its increasing number of transactions as it expands its portfolio of payment solutions for businesses.

Sentinels was chosen due to its ability to monitor transactions globally, together with the platform’s highly adaptable risk-based approach, which it claims to result in quicker and accurate identification of fraudulent transactions.

Using data-driven insights, Sentinels optimises AML and transaction monitoring processes, and generates real-time insights to streamline workflows and compliance. Rules-based alert shaping reduces the number of false positives and provides a clearer, more comprehensive view into the transaction environment.

The platform combines information from different data silos with external sources to feed its insight engine. Historical data and client feedback shape recommendations for next steps so that the platform’s insights continuously improve and become more sophisticated.

B4B Payments’ Paul Swinton says, “As compliance requirements become more stringent across Europe, partnering with Sentinels ensures that we are in the strongest position to meet these obligations and provide our stakeholders with the highest assurance that we are committed to supporting anti-money laundering efforts across the board.”

Sentinels’ recent developments

In October 2021, California-based YouWorld, a fintech solution that enables native payment and currency via gift cards, partnered with Sentinels. At the time, YouWorld was adding new payment functionalities and was being met with increased AML compliance obligations. Using the Sentinels platform, YouWorld was able to combine information from different data silos and make faster and better-informed decisions about suspicious transactions.

Prior to that, in September 2021, London-based PPRO, a fintech company that offers local payments infrastructure to financial institutions, partnered with the Amsterdam-based startup. The companies claimed that the partnership will enhance anti-money laundering controls for PPRO and its customers by enabling a faster response time to suspicious transactions. Besides, PPRO also invested an undisclosed amount in the Dutch company.

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