How ZTL Cut Manual Compliance Workload with Hawk AML, Screening, and Customer Risk Rating Technology

ZTL Mission In Summary: Business Growth With Efficiency

• ZTL is a paytech company serving around 40,000 corporate clients in Northern Europe
• Their previous AML platform required significant manual effort, placing considerable demands on a small AML team and limiting the growth of the business
• ZTL implemented Hawk as its core compliance system for customer and payment screening, customer risk rating, and transaction monitoring

Results in Summary: How ZTL Improved Compliance Efficiency 

• Alerts requiring manual review fell by 88% compared to ZTL’s previous system
• False positives dropped from 4.2% to 0.6% with Hawk’s self-serve rule builder
• All 40,000 customers now get continuous risk assessment and screening – up from 32% under the previous system
• 192 customers previously unclassified as high risk were flagged for enhanced due diligence

ZTL's Goals for Compliance 

ZTL’s previous compliance platform was creating unnecessary friction for its AML team. With a small team of three analysts, too much time was spent on manual processes, making it difficult to scale efficiently and support business growth. 

A key challenge was the lack of control over its transaction monitoring and payment screening setup. There was no self-serve configuration, no ability to fine-tune thresholds or calibrate how strict or loose the screening should be, and no real ownership over the logic driving their alerts. For a company processing high volumes of international payments, this left a three-person analyst team stretched thin, as they spent much of their time working through unnecessary alerts. 

At the time, a significant portion of ZTL’s customer base had not yet been assigned a risk classification. Without a more dynamic approach to customer screening and risk rating, gaining a comprehensive view of portfolio risk required considerable manual effort. This made it more challenging to prioritize reviews and focus enhanced due diligence on the customers who needed it most. 

With ambitious growth plans and upcoming integrations with leading ERP platforms, ZTL needed a compliance solution that could scale alongside the business. The company was looking for greater automation, more accurate customer risk assessment, and more efficient transaction monitoring to enable its compliance team to focus on higher-value activities. 

Hawk Compliance Technology Used by ZTL

• AML Transaction Monitoring - Hawk’s solution gives ZTL direct ownership of their ruleset, so analysts can build, test, and adjust rules independently. It has transformed ZTL’s AML operations. Before Hawk, their false positive rate sat at 4.24%. Once the team rebuilt their rules with Hawk, that rate fell to 0.64%.
• Payment Screening - Hawk’s Payment Screening no-code, self-serve configuration means ZTL’s AML team can screen against any field and tailor Hawk’s proprietary fuzzy matching algorithm with custom weighting, rule by rule. As a result, ZTL maximized the precision of their screening output to match their specific risk profile.
• Customer Risk Rating - Hawk’s Customer Risk Rating solution enables ZTL to build a dynamic, customizable risk model. This moved them from a state where nearly two thirds of their customer base had no risk score at all to a position where every customer is continuously and accurately classified.
• Customer Screening - Hawk’s Customer Screening checks new customers and existing customers on demand against global sanctions lists, PEP databases, and adverse media lists. ZTL’s analysts have confidence that their customer base is being monitored accurately and consistently at all times.

Results: Reduced False Positives & Increased Risk Coverage

ZTL has dramatically cut manual effort while staying fully compliant. Today, the analyst team reviews just 54 payments per day — only 0.49% of total transactions. Hawk’s Transaction Monitoring solution filters out false positives and surfaces only meaningful alerts for manual review. In the first week after going live, alerts requiring analyst review fell by 70%, with ongoing optimization delivering an 88% reduction compared with ZTL’s previous system. 

The biggest impact, however, has been significantly improved risk coverage. Today, all 40,000 customers are supported by comprehensive risk assessments and continuous screening, providing greater visibility across the customer portfolio. 

As a result, the proportion of customers classified as low risk increased by 6.2%, while medium-risk classifications decreased by 7.1%. More importantly, Hawk identified 192 additional customers requiring enhanced due diligence. These customers were already in ZTL’s system but had previously not been classified as high risk. 

ZTL has significantly grown its customer base, all while keeping its AML team to just three analysts. By automating manual processes, Hawk has enabled the team to spend less time processing alerts and more time focusing on genuine financial crime risk.

When we started using Hawk, we had 11,000 corporate customers...now we have over 35,000 customers with the same number of full time employees on the AML team.

Pål Myren, CTO & COO at ZTL
 

Hear more from Pål in this video.
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