How Ebury Scaled AML Transaction Monitoring with AI from Hawk

Ebury's Challenge: Improving AML with Rule Control and AI 

• Ebury is a global financial services provider, offering payments, collections, and foreign exchange services to corporates and SME clients across international markets.
• Its previous rules-based AML transaction monitoring system had limited configurability, restricting the team’s ability to swiftly adapt monitoring controls for a rapidly growing, international client base.
• Ebury proactively implemented Hawk’s AI-enabled AML Transaction Monitoring platform, incorporating advanced anomaly detection and false positive reduction models to continuously evolve its control framework.
• Results: Detection precision doubled and false positive alert rates fell significantly, empowering Ebury to scale international transaction volumes with market-leading control capabilities.
   

Maintaining a Market-Leading Compliance Framework 

As Ebury’s global payment volumes and international footprint rapidly expanded, the business sought to upgrade its transaction monitoring capabilities to maintain a market-leading compliance framework.

Ebury’s existing transaction monitoring setup required vendor involvement for rules updates, limiting the internal team’s ability to rapidly fine-tune detection thresholds or customise monitoring logic for increasingly diverse global client segments. To maintain the highest standard of regulatory compliance while supporting ongoing business expansion, Ebury required a self-serve platform that provided direct control over its ruleset.

Furthermore, Ebury recognized that advanced AI offered significant opportunities to enhance operational effectiveness. By combining agile rule management with AI capabilities – such as machine learning for false positive reduction and anomaly detection for complex pattern recognition - Ebury aimed to continually elevate its first-line controls to match its growth ambition.
 

Hawk allows us to tailor monitoring logic to a broad range of client profiles and international corridors while  leveraging AI anomaly detection to spot emerging risks. This ensures our control framework remains market-leading as Ebury continues to scale globally.

Tom Wain, SVP Operations at Ebury 
 

The Solution: AI-Embedded Transaction Monitoring

Hawk’s AML Transaction Monitoring platform delivered the agility, oversight, and control Ebury required:

• In-house rule agility: Ebury’s controls team can now create, test, and adjust detection logic directly through Hawk’s intuitive interface. Rules can be tested in a dedicated Production Sandbox and deployed in hours, allowing Ebury to respond swiftly to emerging financial crime patterns without vendor delays.
• Segment-specific monitoring: The team can dynamically segment clients by risk profile and geographic footprint, applying precise monitoring logic tailored to distinct client behaviours.
• Advanced AI models: Hawk’s False Positive Reduction model manages high transaction volumes efficiently, while the Anomaly Detection model surfaces subtle, multi-layered risk patterns that static rules alone cannot detect. 

Together, these capabilities allow Ebury to support diverse business segments and expand into new markets with complete confidence in its compliance controls.

• 46% initial reduction in false positives following deployment, increasing to 60% following model retraining.
• Nearly doubled detection precision, increasing the proportion of actionable alerts from 14% to 30%.
• Reduced rule deployment timeline from weeks to hours, significantly enhancing agility.
• Streamlined scalability, enabling Ebury to expand its international client footprint backed by robust, tailored monitoring capabilities
   

Explainable AI Built for Auditors and Regulators

Ensuring AI decisions are fully transparent and defensible to internal stakeholders, auditors, and regulators was a core priority for Ebury. Hawk’s platform provides clear, contextual reasoning for every alert generated, ensuring first-line analysts can interpret, validate, and act on findings immediately.
 

The explainability of Hawk’s models gives our team total clarity over why specific alerts are generated. It provides complete transparency for internal governance and regulatory reporting, ensuring we understand and can clearly evidence the logic driving our controls.

Tom Wain, SVP Operations at Ebury

The user-friendly interface allows analysts to immediately categorise alerts by risk severity and rule type. When new regulatory requirements or emerging typologies arise, Ebury can adapt its monitoring setup in hours, ensuring the control framework continuously evolves alongside the business. The relationship between Ebury and Hawk’s teams also contributed to the success of the project. Hawk’s deep knowledge of AI implementation gave Ebury confidence throughout the process.
 

About Ebury

Ebury provides payment and foreign exchange services to corporate clients and small and medium enterprises. In 2025, Ebury:
• Processed 1.9M+ transactions
• Made payments across 228 countries and collected money from 197
• Sent funds in 111 currencies and received funds in 50 currencies 

To learn more about Hawk's AML Transaction Monitoring solution, request a demo here.