Clouds are gathering over swaths of fintech companies, as falling economic growth, rising interest rates and a cost of living crisis put their business models under strain, forcing job cuts and valuation-crushing funding rounds. ComplyAdvantage founder Charlie Delingpole knows his company is not immune to those forces, as fintechs are among the biggest buyers of his financial crime prevention products. In fact, some clients, including crypto lender Celsius Network, have already gone bust. But the business -- which uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence (AI) to run compliance checks on transactions -- is proving more resilient than most, as Russia-related sanctions and a global clampdown on financial crime underpin healthy demand. "We're the last thing they turn off before their server," says Delingpole, a one-time JPMorgan Chase technology banker, of the enduring demand for his company's services from financial groups -- even when times are tight.

Clouds are gathering over swaths of fintech companies, as falling economic growth, rising interest rates and a cost of living crisis put their business models under strain, forcing job cuts and valuation-crushing funding rounds. ComplyAdvantage founder Charlie Delingpole knows his company is not immune to those forces, as fintechs are among the biggest buyers of his financial crime prevention products. In fact, some clients, including crypto lender Celsius Network, have already gone bust. But the business -- which uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence (AI) to run compliance checks on transactions -- is proving more resilient than most, as Russia-related sanctions and a global clampdown on financial crime underpin healthy demand. "We're the last thing they turn off before their server," says Delingpole, a one-time JPMorgan Chase technology banker, of the enduring demand for his company's services from financial groups -- even when times are tight.

The growth of digital banking has opened up a wealth of opportunities for making the world of finance more accessible and transparent to a greater number of people. But the darker underbelly is that it has also created more avenues for illicit activity to flourish, with some $2 trillion laundered annually but only 1-3% of that sum "caught". To help combat that, a London-based startup called ComplyAdvantage, which has built an AI platform and wider database of some 10 million entities to help identify and track those involved in financial crime, is today announcing a growth round of funding of $50 million expand its reach and operations. Specifically, the plan will be to use the funding for hiring, to invest in the tools it uses to detect entities and map the relationships between them, and to bring on more clients. "We've been focused on more granular analysis and being able to scale to hundreds of millions of searches across our database," said Charles Delingpole, founder and CEO, said in an interview.

A U.K. startup that uses artificial intelligence to help banks and other financial firms with anti-money laundering compliance received $8.2 million to fund its expansion in Europe and North America. The financing for London-based ComplyAdvantage is being lead by British venture capital firm Balderton Capital. The company, which said in a statement it has 200 clients globally, said it would use the money to expand its operations, adding to its current team of about 50 employees. It will also open a sales office in New York this week. Complying with the growing body of anti-money laundering and know-your-customer regulations around the world is becoming an expensive headache for financial institutions.