Madrid-based corporate and trade finance bank Aresbank has selected SymphonyAI’s financial crime compliance technology to strengthen transaction monitoring across its trade finance and correspondent banking operations.
The bank will deploy SymphonyAI’s transaction monitoring platform on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis, replacing controls that are only partially automated and require significant manual intervention.
Once implemented, the platform will monitor correspondent banking flows worth billions of euros each month, alongside Aresbank’s trade finance transactions.
For Aresbank, this involves combining detection rules from SymphonyAI’s retail and correspondent banking models within a single platform and adapting them to the bank’s role in facilitating trade between Europe and North Africa. The deal also expands SymphonyAI’s presence in the Iberian market.
SymphonyAI provides AI-based software for financial crime detection, risk management and compliance across financial services. Its compliance technology is used across retail, commercial and correspondent banking.
Aresbank provides financial services connecting European markets with the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with activity spanning correspondent banking, documentary credits, international guarantees and multi-currency credit lines.
The bank said the new platform will provide greater consistency and transparency across its financial crime compliance operations, while helping it respond to changing regulatory requirements as its trade finance and correspondent banking activity grows.
It also expects the technology to reduce the time spent on manual reviews and speed up the processing of trade finance transactions. The platform is designed to allow Aresbank to accommodate new rules and transaction types without having to rebuild its compliance systems.
Trade finance presents distinct anti-money laundering (AML) challenges compared with retail banking, requiring firms to assess documentation, counterparties and jurisdictions associated with instruments such as guarantees and letters of credit.
Isabel Tobares, head of compliance and global risk control at Aresbank, said, “Our controls were only partially automated and operationally intensive, and they could no longer keep pace with the oversight our regulators expect across trade finance and correspondent banking. The future of AML is not about doing more controls. It’s about making our controls smarter through automation, data, and technology. SymphonyAI gives us a platform built for our business, not a retail template, and one we can scale as our compliance requirements evolve.”
John Edison, president of financial services at SymphonyAI, added, “Aresbank’s business doesn’t look like a typical retail bank, and that’s exactly the point. Our platform is built to support the full range of banking business models, from correspondent banking to trade finance, not just retail compliance. For Aresbank, that meant combining detection rules from both our retail and correspondent banking models into a single solution, then tuning it to reflect the bank’s role as a bridge for trade between Europe and North Africa. This deployment deepens our presence in Iberia and shows how the same financial crime platform trusted by many of the region’s largest banks can be adapted to a specialized institution with a very different risk profile.”
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