Metro Bank has overhauled its financial crime operations through a partnership with SymphonyAI.
As one of the UK’s first challenger banks, Metro Bank has long focused on customer experience and service-led banking, supported by technology. However, its existing financial crime systems had been in place for almost a decade and were no longer suited to a fast-evolving regulatory and operational environment, SymphonyAI explained.
The bank faced mounting challenges linked to its legacy platform, which had become difficult to enhance without significant cost and internal effort. Incremental changes required extensive workarounds, while fragmented systems made it harder to respond quickly to regulatory updates.
Metro Bank identified the need for a unified, cloud-native platform capable of managing the full financial crime lifecycle, supporting dynamic customer risk assessment (CRA), and enabling continuous innovation without disruptive system replacements.
To meet these objectives, Metro Bank selected SymphonyAI’s financial crime prevention platform. The SaaS-based solution brought transaction monitoring, payment screening, name screening, AML investigations, customer risk assessment, legal and court orders, and ongoing due diligence into a single, integrated environment. This consolidation removed silos across the financial crime function and provided a consistent foundation for future AI-driven capabilities.
A key priority for the bank was embedding CRA directly within the same platform used for monitoring and screening. Previously, separate systems made it impossible to link customer risk dynamically with internal and external triggers. SymphonyAI introduced this capability, allowing Metro Bank to assess and act on risk in a more timely and contextual way.
Machine learning models and intelligent exclusion rules, which had previously operated outside the core system, were also brought into the platform, aligned with model governance requirements and ready to be used at scale.
The move to a cloud-native supplier-as-a-service model also aligned with Metro Bank’s broader IT strategy. Evergreen upgrades have reduced internal maintenance requirements and eliminated the need for large, resource-intensive migration programmes, creating a more sustainable approach to long-term compliance.
The results were quickly evident, SymphonyAI said. Alerts are now rolled up to the customer level, reducing duplication and delivering a measurable 20% reduction in transaction monitoring alerts shortly after go-live. The platform also enables faster, more controlled updates in response to regulatory change, while one-call customer onboarding has replaced two separate processes, cutting unnecessary reviews and strengthening governance.
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