Strise

Strise has been named a RiskTech100 2027 Disruptor in Risk Intelligence and Data Management, and I don't take that lightly. Chartis reviewed more than 900 companies this cycle, so this recognition means a great deal. "Disrupt" is a term thrown around extremely loosely. To actually make a tangible difference to an industry takes time, input, trust, and creative thinking. This award highlights companies "driving significant market innovation" and "providing cutting-edge solutions". The compliance industry is notoriously cautious - and rightly so - about being this close to the 'cutting edge'. So, to disrupt this industry, we need to build trust, build relationships, and then deliver something that actually works. Part of that required disrupting our own internal processes. We took apart how we build, changed how we ship, and rethought how we decide what is worth doing at all. That internal change is a huge part of what got us here. It also requires customers willing to come with us on the journey. So thank you to Vipps MobilePay, BDO, British Land, BN Bank ASA, Tenora and many more. Very proud of the team at Strise who did the disrupting. You are the reason the word is more than a pitch deck slide.

I look out from my balcony at a £38m yacht that has been sitting in Canary Wharf for more than four years and I keep coming back to what it says about sanctions compliance. It is called Phi. And it has had better days. These days it is held up by scaffolding. When it was detained in March 2022 under the UK’s Russia sanctions regime, the headline was easy to grasp. A superyacht with a Russian connection made for a very visible enforcement action. What mattered more was the structure behind it. The yacht was legally owned by a company in St Kitts and Nevis. It sailed under a Maltese flag. The ultimate beneficial owner was identified as Sergei Naumenko, a Russian businessman. The NCA said the ownership was “deliberately well hidden”. That is the part I find most useful to think about. Naumenko was not on the UK sanctions list. The owning company was not sanctioned either. If you screened either name on its own, you would not get to the full picture. The yacht was detained under broader powers covering vessels owned or controlled by people "connected with Russia". What changed the assessment was the surrounding network. Who owned the asset? Who controlled it in practice? Which entities sat in between? Which jurisdictions were involved? And which other people or companies were connected closely enough to matter? This is where a lot of sanctions and KYC work becomes more difficult than people expect. The issue is rarely whether a single name appears on a list. The issue is whether the relevant relationships are visible early enough, clearly enough, and with enough context to support a decision. That is one of the reasons I spend so much time thinking about connected data. At Strise we use a Knowledge Graph to connect companies, individuals, beneficial owners, roles and other relevant relationships, so screening can extend beyond a single entity to the parties around it. For me, the value is making it easier for compliance teams to see what actually matters. Most of this work happens in the background through records, structures, alerts and investigations. Then I look out of the window and see Phi still there. And I am reminded that, in sanctions compliance, the outcome often depends on whether you can identify the right connections before someone else has to. Learn more about Strise at: www.strise.ai

Is an MLRO position advertised at £60–80k, a red flag for how seriously a firm actually takes financial crime? Being “on the hook” in financial crime prevention should not be taken lightly. We know banks can feel the wrath of the regulator but a Head of Compliance/MLRO can also be fined personally. Money out of their own pocket and a reputation in tatters. The UAE Central Bank handed down both penalties in June, under a new "should have known" standard. This holds compliance officers accountable for what they reasonably ought to have caught, not just what they can be proven to have known about. That’s real pressure! So are the professionals being fairly compensated? We talked about exactly this on The Laundry this week, with Quentin Downes (Butler Rose) and Rebecca Robinson (Tenora). The responsibilities don't seem to drop. More scrutiny, more personal liability, and more companies operating in full public view. And through this turning up of the pressure, the salaries for these roles have barely moved. So: are compliance and financial crime professionals fairly paid for the accountability they now carry?

Watch a FinCrime analyst onboard a complex entity, and here's what you'll actually see. Directors, shareholdings, registered addresses, revenue sources, transcribed out of a PDF by hand, one line at a time. Mistakes creep in. And the real work, the judgement, hasn't even started yet. With Strise, you turn any document into structured entity data, reconciled against the registry, in minutes. No manual entry. Compliance is judgement work. Administration is not, and it should never require the most qualified analyst in the room. Learn more here https://strise.ai/yes-chef

Your FinCrime team's day: clearing false positives, confirming nothing changed. Meanwhile a UBO three layers up gets sanctioned the week after the file closed. The change that mattered slips through. With Strise, your portfolio and the network behind every customer are monitored continuously. What didn't change closes itself. What did reaches your analyst team as a complete case file with all context needed. Compliance is judgement work. Administration is not, and it should never require the most qualified analyst in the room. Learn more here https://strise.ai/yes-chef

Six years of talking to AML and financial crime prevention teams taught me one thing. The problem isn't the people. It never was. The people are passionate about what they do. They have pattern recognition that's been built over a career, and real judgement that protects the financial system. I've never once met someone who got into compliance to spend their day responding to alarms that aren't real. Every other AI company shows you their perfect "after". The clean dashboard. The hours saves. The team going home early. We wanted to show the truth of what this work looks like today. Compliance is judgement work. It always has been. The alerts, the ownership mapping by hand, the document chasing... that's administration. And administration should not require the most qualified person in the room. That's why we made this film, "Yes, Chef!" We built Strise to remove the routine, not the judgement. Learn more here 👉 https://strise.ai/yes-chef