Innovative Systems has won the award for Best Data Solution for Regulatory Compliance for its FinScan Enhance solution in the Data Management Insight USA Awards 2025.
The awards recognise established providers and innovative newcomers who offer solutions that are providing leading data management solutions, services and consultancy to capital markets participants across Europe.
Winners are selected by A-Team Group’s independent, expert advisory board in collaboration with its editorial team.
We spoke to Héctor Córdova, Global Director, Data Quality Center of Excellence at Innovative Systems about the company’s success.
Data Management Insight: What does winning A-Team Group’s Best Data Solution for Regulatory Compliance mean to you?
Hector: Winning this award is powerful recognition of our “data-first” approach to compliance. For years, data quality has been the Achilles heel of anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions, and overall compliance programs. With FinScan Enhance, we’ve taken decades of data management expertise and applied it directly to the compliance battlefront. Being recognised by A-Team validates the innovation of our technology and the impact it has on helping compliance teams deliver accuracy, efficiency, and defensibility at a time when regulators are raising the bar on data integrity.
DMI: What types of capital markets clients are benefiting from FinScan Enhance?
Hector: FinScan Enhance serves a wide spectrum of capital markets participants, from asset managers and broker-dealers to banks and custodians, virtually any firm where data flows underpin compliance. Many of these organizations face increasingly fragmented data sources, complex customer hierarchies, and multi-jurisdictional sanctions and other regulatory obligations. For them, FinScan Enhance is a lifeline: it normalises and validates messy data before screening, helping compliance officers detect true risk across customers, counterparties, and transactions.
DMI: How does FinScan Enhance’s cognitive matching technology differ from other matching approaches on the market, and what measurable benefits does it bring?
Hector: Unlike generic fuzzy-matching tools, FinScan Enhance uses error-resilient, explainable cognitive matching built on decades of proprietary innovation. It goes beyond phonetic or probabilistic scoring to reveal hidden entities, such as names buried in joint accounts, addresses, noise words, or dummy data. The benefits are substantial: firms report dramatic reductions in both false positives and false negatives, faster clearing of duplicate alerts, improved analyst productivity through the reuse of remediation decisions, and stronger auditability and defensibility when regulators scrutinise their programs.
DMI: Can you share an example where FinScan Enhance significantly improved decision-making accuracy for a client?
Hector: A global investment firm, for instance, may realise that thousands of potential risks have been concealed in address lines and joint account records. If the firm used FinScan Enhance, it would be able to automatically extract those entities, create sub-records, and screen them separately. As a result, the firm would effectively uncover sanctioned entities that would have otherwise slipped through, while simultaneously reducing false positives by double digits. This can protect them from potential fines and give senior management confidence in the integrity of their compliance decisions.
DMI: In what ways does FinScan Enhance help organisations accelerate AI adoption?
Hector: AI thrives on clean, structured, and validated data. Poor-quality inputs can undermine both compliance outcomes and the defensibility of AI models. By delivering a continuous pipeline of trusted, structured data, FinScan Enhance provides the foundation for firms to responsibly integrate AI into their compliance workflows. In short, it transforms “chaotic” customer data into “AI-ready” data, enabling machine learning models to perform with higher accuracy and transparency.
DMI: What kind of return on investment or performance improvement do customers typically report after deploying FinScan Enhance’s full suite of tools?
Hector: Clients typically see 30-50% fewer false positives, which frees significant analyst time and resources. They also report notable improvements in case resolution speed, often cutting review cycles in half. In addition, duplicate alert workloads across systems and data sources are sharply reduced, compliance resources and budgets are optimised, and firms strengthen long-term reputational protection as fewer genuine risks go undetected. The return on investment comes from both efficiency gains and from reducing the far greater cost of regulatory breaches and reputational harm.
DMI: What are the challenges that FinScan Enhance solves for your clients?
Hector: The challenges our clients face are wide-ranging but share a common root: data quality. Many struggle with poor or inconsistent customer data that conceals true risk, and they are under increasing regulatory pressure to validate data integrity as required by Wolfsberg, Fed/OCC SR 11-7, and NYDFS 504. They also grapple with overwhelming volumes of false positives that drain compliance resources, the operational and reputational risk of missing a true hit, and the complexities of fragmented data spread across multiple systems and geographies.
DMI: How does FinScan Enhance help customers address these challenges?
Hector: FinScan Enhance tackles these issues by extracting hidden entities from messy records to ensure accurate screening and by creating sub-records from joint accounts, addresses, and data polluted with noise. It continuously monitors data feeds for errors, safeguarding screening accuracy and making sure potential sanctions breaches are detected. Clients are also able to apply remediation decisions across duplicate alerts, which eliminates redundant work and accelerates decision-making. Above all, FinScan Enhance delivers a repeatable, explainable process that supports audit readiness and keeps compliance aligned with regulatory expectations.
DMI: How do you expect the product to evolve with changing markets?
Hector: As payment rails, customer onboarding models, and regulatory expectations evolve, we expect FinScan Enhance to expand in three important directions. First, it will broaden data coverage with support for new data formats, languages, and structured identifiers such as ISO 20022. Second, it will deepen its synergy with artificial intelligence, ensuring the data feeding AI models is validated, explainable, and regulator-ready. And third, it will continue to grow in scalability and deployment flexibility, particularly in SaaS and hybrid options, to process billions of records at real-time speeds. In short, as markets innovate, FinScan Enhance will ensure compliance data remains a trusted foundation rather than a hidden liability.
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