Symphony Accelerates AI Integration and Announces Leadership Changes

Symphony is advancing its secure AI and workflow capabilities following a year of significant growth. The company, serving over 1,400 clients, has introduced the AI Agent Studio, a framework designed to let institutions create and deploy AI agents for internal and external workflows. This new tool leverages Symphony’s verified directory and compliance infrastructure, allowing firms to automate complex tasks while maintaining strict data control.

Alongside these product developments, Symphony announced a leadership transition. Ben Chrnelich, formerly co-CEO, has been appointed Chief Executive Officer and President. Brad Levy will move to an external advisory role for the board. The company also highlighted the integration of its AI studio with the Confidential Cloud platform, launched in 2025, which offers cloud scalability with on-premise security levels. Additionally, Symphony is launching WhatsApp Voice with secure recording and archiving, enhancing Microsoft Teams connectivity, and expanding its trader voice analytics to extract insights from high-quality call data.

Cosegic Acquires FINTRAIL

Cosegic has acquired FINTRAIL, a specialist financial crime consultancy, adding depth to its financial crime and regulatory risk capabilities.

FINTRAIL advises firms on financial crime risk management, regulatory compliance, and controls design across banking, payments, fintech, and digital assets. Its entire team will join Cosegic, expanding the scale of specialist expertise available to clients across multiple jurisdictions.

Ben Cook, Group CEO of Cosegic, said the acquisition strengthens an already established financial crime capability and reflects continued investment in specialist expertise as regulatory expectations increase. “FINTRAIL has an exceptional specialist team and bringing them into Cosegic strengthens an already strong financial crime capability. This move makes sense for our clients, gives us an additional edge, and reinforces our commitment to investing in specialist expertise as regulatory expectations continue to rise. This acquisition of FINTRAIL is an exciting step for Cosegic.”

Robert Evans, CEO and co-founder of FINTRAIL, said joining Cosegic allows the firm to extend its original mission at greater scale. “We are joining Cosegic at an exciting time for both businesses. FINTRAIL was founded to provide practical, high-quality financial crime support to firms facing real regulatory challenges, and becoming part of Cosegic allows us to build on that mission at a greater scale. We are delighted to join an established compliance company that shares our focus on integrity and delivering outcomes that matter to clients.”

Nancy King, Senior Managing Director and Head of Corporate Development at Cosegic, said the acquisition aligns with the group’s focus on building targeted specialist capability in areas of growing regulatory scrutiny. “This acquisition aligns closely with our strategy of building targeted, specialist capability in areas of increasing regulatory focus.”

Henry Alty, Investment Director at MML Capital Partners, noted that the transaction marks Cosegic’s second acquisition in two months, as part of a broader buy-and-build strategy focused on specialist compliance capabilities across key international markets.

FCA Extends UK Equity Consolidated Tape Consultation

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has extended the deadline for its consultation on the proposed framework for the UK Equity Consolidated Tape. The consultation period for CP25/31 will now close on 13 February 2026, providing market participants with additional time to respond.

CP25/31 sets out the regulatory architecture for a UK equity consolidated tape, including data-contribution obligations for trading venues and Approved Publication Arrangements (APAs), alongside the governance, operational and commercial expectations for a future Consolidated Tape Provider (CTP).

At the heart of the FCA’s plan is a centralised, standardised view of UK equity market activity. The tape would aggregate post-trade data and selected pre-trade information – most notably an attributed best bid and offer – across lit venues and OTC trading. The objective is to address long-standing fragmentation in UK equity data, where firms currently rely on multiple proprietary feeds with inconsistent formats, latency profiles and licensing terms.

The consultation extension is also notable for what it signals about the next phase of the project. Potential CTP candidates may use the additional time to refine expressions of interest, stress-test technical architectures and clarify commercial models. Market participants, meanwhile, are being asked to provide concrete evidence on implementation costs, governance safeguards and how the tape could be consumed operationally rather than remaining a purely analytical tool.

While the FCA has indicated that a policy statement will follow once responses are assessed, the timetable points toward a target go-live in 2027. That places the UK on a trajectory that broadly parallels, but does not replicate, the EU’s own consolidated tape ambitions.

For now, the extended deadline creates a wider window for engagement. Whether the consolidated tape ultimately delivers simpler access and lower costs will hinge less on the concept itself and more on the details now being debated: data scope, pricing discipline and the operational realities of integrating a single market view into day-to-day trading and compliance workflows.

Simplifying AML for Mutuals: Napier AI and Mutual Vision’s Sector-Focused Approach

Napier AI and Mutual Vision have partnered to address a long-standing gap in financial crime compliance technology for building societies and credit unions, launching a sector-specific platform designed around the operational realities of mutual companies in the UK and Canada.

The result, MV Shield – Powered by Napier AI, is positioned as a compliance-as-a-service platform that combines Mutual Vision’s experience supporting mutual organisations with Napier AI’s financial crime technology. Rather than adapting generic AML systems, MV Shield has been configured specifically for smaller institutions that often operate with lean compliance teams and legacy or manual processes.

For many building societies and credit unions, fragmented tooling and limited in-house technical capacity have made it difficult to keep pace with rising regulatory expectations. The partnership aims to simplify that challenge by providing pre-configured controls, reporting, and risk models that reflect the behaviours and risk profiles typical of the mutual sector.

Unlike broad, one-size-fits-all AML platforms, MV Shield is built around the operational patterns of mutuals. It brings together customer screening and transaction monitoring within a managed service model, allowing institutions to deploy established compliance workflows from the outset without undertaking complex internal development. The platform also incorporates AI models tailored to mutual-sector risk exposure, alongside more than one hundred pre-configured typologies developed through Napier AI’s work with the Financial Conduct Authority.

Taken together, this approach is intended to allow smaller compliance teams to deliver outcomes more commonly associated with much larger operations. Faster onboarding reduced false positives, and the ability to scale compliance activity without proportionate increases in headcount are positioned as practical benefits of the model.

Greg Watson, CEO of Napier AI, said: “MV Shield makes compliance-first AI accessible to institutions that have traditionally been underserved by the technology market. Mutual Vision’s deep roots in the building society sector, combined with Napier AI’s proven platform and regulatory expertise, create a powerful proposition that strengthens operational resilience and reduces the burden of compliance.”

From Mutual Vision’s perspective, the emphasis is on alignment with the day-to-day regulatory pressures facing smaller firms. Tim Bowen, CEO of Mutual Vision, commented: “Our customers and other small and mid-sized firms need screening and AML technology that is modern, explainable, easy to implement and aligned to the regulatory challenges they face every day. By powering MV Shield with Napier AI, we’re giving these firms the opportunity to adopt a Tier one grade solution that is a simple and affordable way to raise their compliance maturity.”

He added that the platform is designed to avoid the disruption typically associated with large-scale transformation projects: “This is also a solution that does not have the disruption or cost normally associated with major transformation projects. MV Shield is a sector-informed, preconfigured AML platform, not a generic tool, and it is designed around the unique processes and risk patterns of our customers.”

Cerberus Selects Behavox for AI-Native Comms Surveillance

Cerberus Capital Management has selected Behavox to support its communications surveillance programme, adding AI-driven monitoring across voice, chat and email as part of a broader compliance controls strategy.

The deployment centres on Behavox Quantum, an AI-native surveillance capability designed to operate across multiple communication channels and languages. Within Cerberus, it will sit alongside other elements of Behavox’s Unified Controls Framework, which brings together communications surveillance, trade surveillance, archiving and policy management into a single operating model. The emphasis is on improving the quality of alerts while reducing the operational burden associated with large volumes of false positives.

From Cerberus’ perspective, the evaluation focused on whether the technology could meet demanding internal standards around explainability, scalability and day-to-day effectiveness. As Andrew Kandel, Cerberus Chief Compliance Officer, noted: “We have seen the success Behavox has had over the past few years with explainable AI for compliance and driving operational efficiency for compliance teams by reducing false positives and identifying meaningful items for teams to review.” He added: “In evaluating the market, we were comfortable with Behavox’s approach and long-term roadmap at an affordable rate.”

Behavox points to this as part of a broader trend among large investment firms that are moving beyond basic surveillance coverage towards more transparent and defensible controls. Nabeel Ebrahim, Chief Revenue Officer at Behavox, said: “Cerberus’ emphasis on fundamentals of having effective, explainable and scalable detective controls was a key driver in their decision.” He added that Cerberus undertook a detailed assessment of the underlying AI to ensure it aligned with its compliance expectations.

In addition to technology, Cerberus is also making use of Behavox’s Alert Review Managed Services as an extension of its compliance function. The service combines Behavox’s AI with experienced reviewers to provide consistent alert handling, governance and oversight, with the aim of allowing in-house teams to focus on higher-value supervisory and strategic work rather than alert throughput.

Michael Talbert, Head of Professional Services at Behavox, framed the managed service element as an operational assurance layer rather than a pure outsourcing play: “Managed Services is about confidence and consistency. Cerberus wanted assurance that its surveillance program operates to a high standard every day, not just strong technology, but strong execution.”

Behavox also highlights that its large language models have been in live production for more than three years and have already been through internal audit reviews, regulatory examinations and model validation exercises. For firms such as Cerberus, this operational track record appears to be as important as the underlying AI capability, particularly as regulators continue to scrutinise how advanced analytics are embedded into surveillance and compliance frameworks.

Founded in 1992, Cerberus is a global alternative investment firm with approximately $70 billion in assets across credit, real estate and private equity strategies, investing across the capital structure with a focus on long-term value creation.

FMO Taps Fenergo to Modernise KYC and Onboarding Across Emerging-Market Portfolios

Dutch development bank FMO has selected Fenergo to modernise its client onboarding and know-your-customer operations, as it looks to streamline compliance across a diverse portfolio of investments in emerging markets.

The bank is deploying Fenergo’s client lifecycle management (CLM) platform alongside its Document Agent capability, with the objective of accelerating onboarding timelines, improving transparency, and supporting consistent regulatory oversight across jurisdictions with varying data quality and regulatory maturity.

For development banks such as FMO, KYC is structurally more complex than in many commercial banking environments. Portfolios often span project finance, blended finance, equity investments and long-dated development initiatives, frequently involving counterparties in higher-risk or less digitised markets. That complexity places pressure on onboarding teams to balance robust due diligence with the need to maintain momentum in capital deployment.

Against that backdrop, FMO’s selection of Fenergo reflects a broader shift among regulated institutions towards more industrialised, workflow-driven KYC frameworks that reduce manual effort while preserving auditability. By standardising how documentation is collected, assessed and governed, the bank expects to reduce friction in onboarding while maintaining alignment with supervisory expectations.

According to Friso Schellekens, Director of KYC at FMO, the decision was driven by the need for a platform that could operate effectively across demanding regulatory environments. “Fenergo stood out for its proven ability to handle comprehensive customer due diligence in emerging markets, amid demanding regulatory requirements,” he said. Schellekens added that alignment with FMO’s governance framework was a critical factor, particularly as the bank continues to expand and diversify its portfolio.

From an operational perspective, the implementation is intended to shorten onboarding cycles and free compliance teams from repetitive, document-heavy tasks. Automating elements of document ingestion and lifecycle management allows KYC specialists to focus on higher-risk cases and judgement-based reviews, while generating more consistent data and reporting outputs for internal oversight.

The deployment also signals growing interest among development finance institutions in technology platforms traditionally associated with tier-one commercial banks. While CLM adoption has been well established in large financial institutions, its extension into development banking reflects increasing regulatory scrutiny and rising expectations around transparency, data lineage and audit readiness.

For Fenergo, the engagement marks its first development banking client, extending the platform’s footprint into a segment with distinct regulatory and operational characteristics. Ruth Ormsby, Managing Director for EMEA at Fenergo, described the partnership as aligned with the firm’s longer-term product direction, noting a focus on moving beyond static workflow tools towards more adaptive, intelligence-led compliance systems.

More broadly, the deal underscores a common theme emerging across KYC and client onboarding programmes: the transition from fragmented, manual processes towards end-to-end platforms that can scale across products, geographies and regulatory regimes. As development banks continue to play a central role in financing growth and sustainability initiatives in emerging markets, the ability to combine speed, transparency and regulatory control is becoming a strategic requirement rather than a back-office concern.

Encompass Establishes Executive Advisory Board to Support CDI and KYC Strategy

Encompass has formed an Executive Advisory Board (EAB) as it looks to strengthen the strategic direction of its Corporate Digital Identity (CDI) platform and its application across KYC and compliance workflows. The board is intended to provide senior-level insight as Encompass expands internationally and responds to growing regulatory, data, and technology pressures facing financial institutions.

Rather than a governance body in the formal sense, the EAB is positioned as a source of external challenge and expertise. Its remit spans innovation, customer-centric growth, governance and risk practices, and the practical use of AI in KYC operations, with CDI positioned as the underlying data layer supporting those objectives.

The board is chaired by Doris Honold, who has more than 25 years’ experience in senior leadership roles across global financial institutions, with a focus on transformation, governance, operational resilience, and organisational leadership. Honold has been part of Encompass’s Executive Board since 2021, giving continuity between advisory input and day-to-day strategy.

Alongside Honold, the EAB includes senior industry figures such as David Hudson and Colin Bell, both of whom have held leadership roles at institutions including JP Morgan, HSBC, and Standard Chartered Bank. Collectively, the group brings experience across governance, risk management, compliance, and digital transformation—areas where banks continue to face rising expectations from regulators and supervisors.

From Encompass’s perspective, the board is intended to help the firm anticipate how compliance models are evolving, particularly as institutions look to modernise KYC processes and introduce more automation and AI-driven decisioning. The emphasis is less on product promotion and more on aligning CDI capabilities with how banks actually implement change across operations, data, and control frameworks.

Commenting on the launch, Encompass CEO Wayne Johnson said:

“The launch of the EAB marks a pivotal moment for Encompass and the industry. As financial institutions face unprecedented regulatory and operational challenges, the EAB will ensure we remain at the forefront of innovation.

Leveraging the expertise of global leaders, we can accelerate the adoption of CDI as the essential data foundation for innovation, including AI. By, building trust, improving transparency, and enabling institutions to meet complex KYC requirements with confidence, CDI unlocks the full potential of emerging technologies. This initiative reinforces our mission to deliver transformative solutions that strengthen resilience across the financial ecosystem.”

In practical terms, the EAB will feed into Encompass’s strategic planning by providing market-level insight on where KYC and identity verification are heading, including how regulatory expectations around data quality, explainability, and resilience are likely to develop. This reflects a broader industry shift away from static compliance tooling toward data-driven foundations that can support multiple regulatory and operational use cases.

For Encompass, the creation of the EAB signals an effort to formalise that dialogue with senior practitioners and to ensure its CDI approach remains aligned with real-world implementation challenges faced by global financial institutions.

ID-Pal Acquires KYB Specialist NorthRow

Dublin based ID-Pal recently acquired Know Your Business (KYB) specialist NorthRow , extending its identity verification platform to cover both individual and corporate risk within a single compliance framework. The move brings native KYB checks into ID-Pal’s existing KYC and AML offering, responding to growing regulatory pressure for firms to maintain an ongoing view of customer and counterparty risk rather than relying on point-in-time checks.

Founded in 2016, ID-Pal has built its business around AI-enabled identity verification and screening across multiple jurisdictions. The addition of NorthRow’s business verification capabilities allows firms using the platform to verify companies, track changes in ownership or directorship, and monitor corporate status alongside individual identity checks. In practical terms, this creates a consolidated risk view across people and entities, addressing a long-standing gap between KYC and KYB processes.

The deal also reflects broader shifts in compliance operations. Regulatory regimes in the UK, EU and US are placing increasing emphasis on continuous monitoring, particularly in response to reforms such as the US Corporate Transparency Act and tighter UK requirements. At the same time, firms face rising exposure to sanctions risk and increasingly sophisticated forms of document fraud, making fragmented onboarding and monitoring models harder to sustain.

ID-Pal founder and CEO Colum Lyons framed the acquisition in that context, pointing to both regulatory change and evolving threat vectors.

“Alongside co-founders James O’Toole and Robert O’Farrell, ID-Pal was created to support businesses with accurate identity verification built on privacy preservation. As the financial services space becomes more regulated, and with AI-driven document fraud becoming the biggest threat our industry has faced, it is essential that businesses have a unified view of the risks ahead and how to manage them. Our acquisition of NorthRow allows ID-Pal to unify this process within one comprehensive platform that defends businesses against fraud at every entry point and avoids noncompliance fines.”

From a customer perspective, the transaction brings together complementary strengths already used in production environments. Payments provider Caxton, a long-standing NorthRow client, highlighted the operational value of tighter integration between individual and business checks.

“Using NorthRow’s technologies, Caxton has seen first-hand the value they bring to compliance processes. This acquisition is a great step forward by combining their expertise with ID-Pal’s award-winning technology to create a powerful platform for the future. We’re excited to start working with ID-Pal and to benefit from the innovation in KYC and KYB risk intelligence that this partnership will deliver.”

The combined client base spans financial services, government and enterprise organisations, and the acquisition expands ID-Pal’s reach across regulated sectors that increasingly require joined-up identity, business verification and AML controls. NorthRow’s services will continue to operate without interruption, with platform integration planned over time as part of a longer-term product roadmap aimed at improving consistency and user experience across compliance workflows.

Trillium Surveyor Extended for Prediction Markets

Trillium Surveyor has gone live with trade surveillance for prediction markets, positioning the firm’s controls toolkit for a segment that has moved quickly from niche curiosity to a retail-facing, high-velocity “event contract” market.

The backdrop is a fast-evolving regulatory perimeter. US event contracts that are listed as derivatives on registered venues sit within the CFTC’s DCM regime, but the expansion into sports-style contracts has sharpened the fault line with state gaming authorities. A series of state cease-and-desist actions against sports-style event contracts (including in Nevada and New Jersey) has triggered litigation over pre-emption and jurisdiction, with at least one recent federal ruling in Nevada siding with state gaming authorities rather than the platform’s federal-only argument.

At the federal level, the CFTC has signalled heightened scrutiny of “gaming” style contracts through proposed rulemaking updates to its event contracts rule (CFTC Rule 40.11), designed to clarify when an event contract involves enumerated activities and when it may be deemed contrary to the public interest. In parallel, the regulator has shown it can intervene tactically: Reuters reported that Robinhood rolled back Super Bowl-related event contracts following a CFTC request in February 2025.

Enforcement history has also shaped market structure. In January 2022, the CFTC ordered Blockratize, Inc. (doing business as Polymarket) to pay a $1.4 million penalty for offering off-exchange event-based binary options and failing to register appropriately, underscoring that “event contracts” are not a regulatory free pass. More recently, the CFTC issued an Amended Order of Designation for QCX LLC d/b/a Polymarket US (a designated contract market), supporting an intermediated, regulated market-access model.

It is into this environment that Trillium is extending Surveyor. The firm says prediction markets trade differently from traditional markets because outcomes are binary and event-anchored (sports, elections, economic releases), with trading intensity and risk concentrating as events near resolution. Trillium says Surveyor’s new coverage supports market abuse monitoring and market integrity and follows prior platform expansions into digital assets and extended trading hours.

Melissa Watras, Director of Product at Trillium Surveyor, said: “We invest ahead of market shifts so oversight is in place before new markets scale.”

Chartis Ranks Kyckr a Category Leader for 2025, Highlighting Strength in Corporate Structure and UBO Data

Kyckr has again been recognised by Chartis as one of the leading providers of Know Your Customer (KYC) data, reinforcing the company’s role in a market increasingly shaped by real-time, authoritative entity information. The latest Chartis RiskTech Quadrant for KYC Data and Solutions places Kyckr in the Category Leader tier for the second year running, reflecting growing industry demand for accurate company-registry intelligence as Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYB) and anti-money laundering (AML) obligations expand.

Chartis’ analysis examines 12 providers that supply KYC data to financial services firms, with evaluation criteria centred on data coverage, structure and delivery. Kyckr received top scores for “corporate structure” and “entity relationships” – areas that highlight the strength of its core proposition: live registry data aggregated from more than 300 official sources worldwide. Access to verified corporate data at this level of depth and jurisdictional breadth increasingly underpins due-diligence workflows, where firms are seeking to reduce manual effort and improve confidence in Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) verification.

Providing additional context on the ranking, Phil Mackenzie, Senior Research Principal at Chartis, noted: “Kyckr continues to demonstrate strength in an increasingly data-driven compliance ecosystem. Strong domain expertise and integration capabilities, as well as a focus on delivering real-time entity data at scale, all contributed to its category leader placement in the KYC Data RiskTech Quadrant.”

The recognition follows a year of expansion for Kyckr, including the onboarding of 28 new obliged entities, enhancements to data sourcing across key regions, and deeper integrations with RegTech platforms including Strise and Spektr.

Reflecting on the challenges firms face, CEO Steve Lamb said: “Companies needing to carry out customer due diligence are faced with tightening regulations and a fast-shifting registry landscape. This presents significant challenges in accessing reliable, authoritative data. Being named a category leader by Chartis Research is significant validation of Kyckr’s solution and reflects our continued investment in data quality, jurisdiction expansion and advanced entity-resolution technologies to support clients’ rapidly evolving compliance needs.”