Quantexa

How Quantexa Harnessed Big Data & Analytics to Combat Financial Crime

THE CHALLENGE

Quantexa is a big data and enterprise intelligence provider, utilising technologies such as entity resolution, network analysis and AI to deliver complex services that detect and prevent financial crime. Its clients include some of the largest tier 1 organisations worldwide.

Financial crime costs the global economy $2.4 trillion every year (Refinitiv, 2018). However, organisations only spend roughly 3.1% of their turnover to fight these crimes, which include fraud, tax evasion, theft, money laundering and more. Data lies at the heart of the issue. Organisations have a huge number of data sources that contain payment and identity details – and these are managed across multiple distinct databases and systems, which are not connected and cannot talk to one another.

This is further exacerbated by modern customers’ preferences for multiple channels and different interfaces to make transactions. With each system producing different outputs on an enormous scale, it can become impossible to monitor consistently, and to track any emerging fraud in real-time. Quantexa’s technology has a huge range of applications, from uncovering new leads through to understanding risk, or even uncovering criminal activity.

Its vision is to be the number one company in providing entity resolution and network analysis worldwide. Quantexa looked to Google Premier Partner, Appsbroker, to enable it to achieve this objective.

Jamie Hutton, CTO at Quantexa, explains: “Financial crime is by definition a very complex domain. Firstly, the criminals are trying to evade detection by changing their details and manipulating their information, and they’ll also have a footprint across many disparate systems.

Our customers are under huge pressure to respond to these challenges, both from a cost perspective – financial crime costs are estimated to be growing at 11% every year – and from a regulatory point of view, as penalties for non-compliance are becoming increasingly stringent.

Initially Quantexa’s analytics technology is delivered through on-premises, hybrid and full cloud models. However the limitations of on-premises-based hardware and the scale at which the technology operates, means that more and more, Quantexa are turning to the cloud to realise its ambitions to become the number one entity resolution and network analysis provider worldwide.

Entity resolution refers to a process that gathers together a complete body of data about one particular item or object – in Quantexa’s case, this can cover individuals such as those committing fraudulent activities and all their associated activities.

Network analysis then looks at all connections these entities or individuals have, and pathways between entities that can be used to commit crimes. Together, these constitute billions of records.”

THE SOLUTION

With a need to rapidly deploy services across an exponentially-growing customer base, Quantexa needed market-leading technology. Quantexa operate a multi-cloud strategy and heavily use the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to deliver their solutions. Quantexa selected Appsbroker to help deliver the project, offering a decade of experience in delivering complex solutions on GCP at scale.

Hutton explains: “As CTO, I look after our technology and run our R&D team, and it’s my responsibility to ensure that our platform is cutting edge and delivering value for our customers.

Quantexa has a multi-cloud strategy, but we chose GCP in this instance for a number of reasons, including hardware performance, cost efficiencies, truly industry-leading Kubernetes services and a whole range of market-leading and uniquely differentiated capabilities.

Appsbroker have unrivalled experience in deploying enterprise-grade solutions on GCP, and quickly configured both Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) elements to support the complexity of solution that our customers demand.”

Quantexa’s customers access this solution through a simple to consume Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, which uses the scale and speed of the Google infrastructure to be able to analyse and assess the many billions of records and activities which can conceal these individuals. The technology then looks at every available data source to match entities and their connections.

GCP’s data analytics capabilities help to deliver market-leading and comprehensive reporting across the entire Quantexa estate, including premises-based and full cloud deployments, securely partitioned by customer. This enables continual improvements and detailed business intelligence to maximise the efficacy of the service.

The performance of GCP enables it to constantly be available and track activities in real time, delivering exceptional value to clients while charging on a cost-effective operational expenditure basis.

THE RESULTS

The ability to quickly spin up new instances for new organisations, while running on a common scalable infrastructure has vastly improved Quantexa’s time-to-market, and also ensured that all GCP customers can enjoy the benefits of scalability and analytical depth, without being constrained by premises-based limitations.