Roman Eloshvili is the founder of ComplyControl, a cutting-edge provider of AI-powered compliance and risk management services. Roman has over two decades of experience in finance, and his career spans traditional banking, real estate, and close collaboration with major European financial institutions. He is dedicated to the idea of transforming the financial industry’s approach to regulatory compliance, with a focus on creating cost-effective and efficient solutions for banks and financial institutions.
Since founding ComplyControl in early 2023, Roman has worked tirelessly to address the high costs and inefficiencies associated with traditional compliance services, leveraging cutting-edge AI technology to streamline a variety of processes. ComplyControl’s mission is to revolutionise compliance by offering a robust AI-driven system capable of analysing bank transactions against various sanctions lists and identifying potential risks. All of which is done at speeds far exceeding those of manual checks and solutions that are already available on the market.
What inspired you to found ComplyControl, and what specific challenges in banking compliance were you aiming to address? How did your prior experience in fintech and traditional banking shape the company’s vision?
I’ve spent more than 10 years in the financial markets, and when working closely with established European banks, I couldn’t help but notice a glaring issue. That there is a significant deficit in the adoption of advanced Internet banking solutions akin to those we can find in many of the world’s leading fintech hubs.
I explored various ways of addressing this problem and, by 2023, came to recognise the potential that artificial intelligence holds in the financial sector. This led me to build ComplyControl — a company that specialises in AI-based tech solutions for banks. Its goal is to help banks and fintechs navigate the complexities of compliance and risk management with greater effectiveness, putting them on par with the more modern fintech services.
AI has become a transformative force across industries. How does ComplyControl leverage AI to enhance compliance and risk management in banking?
As I already mentioned, ComplyControl offers AI-powered solutions for banks and financial institutions. At its core, our business is about making compliance and risk management smarter, faster, and more cost-efficient. Our AI system is designed to automate, optimize, and adapt compliance processes in real time, reducing the need for manual effort.
ComplyControl’s services include real-time AML fraud detection, adverse media checks for combating terrorism financing (CTF), and sanctions screening with AI validation. One of our standout innovations is the recently launched AI-powered visual compliance rules editor, designed to simplify transaction monitoring. It enables compliance officers to create and customise rules even without any particular coding experience, as the built-in AI evaluates the effectiveness of rules and how up-to-date they are. This considerably simplifies the compliance workflow, allowing for faster results.
Beyond automation, our solutions also address more complex challenges, like analysing payment patterns to detect suspicious activity. For example, we make use of artificial intelligence in transaction reference text analysis to identify signs of suspicious and potentially criminal activity. I have often observed that traditional approaches can fall short in this area, because the rules for what qualifies as “suspicious activity” can vary a lot across payment systems. As a result, checking things manually makes for a slow process and yields inconsistent results.
ComplyControl’s AI tools help streamline these processes, enabling faster and more accurate fraud detection, allowing financial institutions to stay ahead of potential threats. In the future, we are also planning to introduce smart regulatory monitoring and regulatory intelligence with AI-driven rule suggestions, which will allow financial organizations to adapt to changing compliance requirements with greater efficiency.
The AI-powered visual compliance rules editor is a unique offering. Can you walk us through how it works and its benefits for compliance officers?
Yes, as stated previously, the editor is designed to simplify the monitoring process: it allows compliance officers to create and customise transaction monitoring rules through a highly intuitive, no-code visual interface without having to rely on programmers or IT teams.
It is still a work-in-progress, and we are planning to add new features to this tool in the future, taking its capabilities even further. Soon, the editor will support natural language input, allowing compliance officers to write rules in plain human language, much like we can already write requests with tools like ChatGPT. This will make the whole process even more accessible and less time-consuming, empowering teams across the financial sector.
What role does AI play in improving the accuracy of sanction screenings and minimizing false positives?
The way I see it, one of the main advantages of AI is its ability to process and analyse large volumes of data quickly and effectively. In terms of screening, it means that banks can evaluate each customer and their transactions more accurately, allowing for a higher degree of accuracy in identifying potential matches on sanctions lists.
Additionally, with proper application, AI can help financial institutions adapt more quickly to changing regulatory demands by automating the interpretation of new rules and identifying the ones relevant to their operations. This way, banks can stay ahead of compliance demands and reduce the risk of costly fines for non-compliance.
This helps to both streamline internal processes and get some peace of mind, as banks can focus more on serving their clients and less on regulatory concerns.
Manual compliance processes are often slow and costly. How does ComplyControl address this pain point, particularly for SMBs that may lack resources?
One example that readily comes to mind is how we use AI to drastically reduce time on translating legal contracts. This process could take weeks in the past, with multiple translators and legal specialists doing revision after revision to iron all the details out. Now, it can be done in minutes, with minimal human corrections required. It’s plain to see how this innovation can help: you not only get to free up a lot of time for other tasks but also save yourself thousands of euros in expenses.
Another area where AI tools help out a lot is development. Take our own team, for example: by automating routing coding tasks, our human specialists can put more focus on solving more complex and creative challenges, boosting the speed at which ComplyControl can introduce new and innovative services.
And for one final example: I’ve mentioned earlier that ComplyControl is working on developing an AI-driven system for monitoring and analysing regulatory requirements across different jurisdictions. This will allow banks and other financial institutions to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to regulatory changes, allowing them to adapt faster and with greater ease. It’s not often that SMBs can afford to maintain an extensive compliance team, so by automating and streamlining many of these processes, we give them a way to take care of their needs without overextending their resources.
What are the biggest challenges you see banks facing in compliance today, and how is ComplyControl positioned to tackle them?
The biggest issues that I have personally run into with banks stem from the fact that their compliance services are quite high-cost and not nearly as efficient as they should ideally be. Deloitte’s research previously indicated that over the last decade, compliance-related costs in retail and corporate banking have seen a rise of over 60%. This state of things does not inspire much confidence, which is precisely why I believe that efforts must be made to improve the situation.
At ComplyControl, we tackle the existing inefficiencies head-on and offer a faster, more precise way to handle compliance. And at much lower costs, too. Our AI-powered system enables banks to process payments with a fee as low as 2 cents per transaction checked. This mix of speed, accuracy and affordability is precisely what banks need in modern times to improve their efficiency.
With the ever-changing landscape of international regulations, how does ComplyControl ensure its solutions remain up-to-date and effective?
As I mentioned earlier, ComplyControl has plans to develop a system that will help financial institutions stay on top of regulatory changes. By automatically tracking updates to regulations in regions relevant to our clients, our system will be able to provide tailored advice on how companies can follow these rules. This is a service that we believe will see a lot of demand, seeing as the companies won’t have to look up all this information themselves, saving them a lot of time and effort.
And when you launch this system of yours, how do you envision it impacting the financial industry?
In a very positive way, I should think. I believe it’s no secret that regulatory rules in the financial sector change almost on a daily basis. And that’s why our future system can change the lives of banks and financial institutions for the better: because it will continuously update all the sanctions lists and rules whenever something changes.
With the help of AI, it will allow these companies to run their operations in a faster, cheaper and more accurate manner. Moreover, as I said before, it will give personalised recommendations on how they’d need to adjust their processes to meet the requirements of any particular regulator.
How do you see AI shaping the broader fintech and banking compliance sectors in the next five years?
I believe that compliance is one of those areas where AI is not just helpful — it’s honestly a must-have. There are far too many routine tasks in this area that require a lot of constant attention, and people physically can’t maintain that level of precision all the time. AI, on the other hand, would be perfectly suited to take over some of these responsibilities.
In the broader context of banking and fintech, I’m sure that we will see the widespread implementation of artificial intelligence in various areas beyond just compliance. AI will be actively used in customer support, personalisation of services and automation of processes across all operational levels. Integrating this technology will help financial institutions reduce costs and combat the shortage of specialists in various areas, making them a lot more efficient overall.
Another thing worth noting is that in 2025, AI implementation will be easier than it was a year ago. There will be many ready-made solutions on the market available for integration, and AI models will reach a new level in terms of decision-making quality.
At the same time, the cost of such solutions will likely not be too high — probably comparable to the prices of the current legacy systems or maybe even lower — making them accessible to businesses of various sizes.
It’s also possible that AI will become an integral part of other technologies and companies will offer it as additional functionality in service packages for a minimal extra fee (or even for free). Many big names, such as Google or Microsoft are already doing this.
Before long, I believe that AI will move away from being a cutting-edge novelty that’s “nice to have” and become just one more fundamental tool in this industry, just a more efficient one.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit ComplyControl.