Sectors we support.

Payment Institutions and EMIs are dealing with the same pressure in different forms: growth has outpaced governance. New products, new jurisdictions and new merchants arrive faster than onboarding, transaction monitoring and oversight can absorb. Supervisors tend to notice the gap before the firm does, and the first place they look is the file: a recent onboarding decision, a monitoring alert that should have escalated, a merchant relationship that no longer fits the original risk picture. Claritas comes in at that point. The work is reading the operation as it actually runs and telling the MLRO and Board what a supervisor will conclude when they read the same evidence.

Smaller investment firms operate in a regulatory environment where products, client types and distribution models keep shifting, and the compliance team carrying that complexity is usually small. Individual responsibility sits heavily on the MLRO and one or two colleagues. The files supervisors choose to read are almost always the awkward ones: layered ownership, partial source of wealth, a PEP identified late in the relationship, a periodic review that drifted past its date. Claritas reads those files first, then works through methodology, risk rating and Board reporting with the people who own them. The aim is straightforward, an evidenced record the firm can stand behind under challenge.

Independent wealth managers look after clients whose affairs rarely sit in one jurisdiction or one structure. Trusts, foundations, family-office vehicles, holdings in several names and assets in several places are the norm. Source of wealth and source of funds depend on documentation that was assembled years ago, generational transfers that have since reshaped ownership and judgements that need to hold up when a supervisor reads the file. Most of the work Claritas does for wealth managers is on relationships the firm knows well, but where the record on the file no longer matches the conversation in the room.

Asset managers run a significant share of their financial crime risk through other people. Investor onboarding sits with the administrator or transfer agent, custody and oversight sit with the depositary, distribution sits with platforms and intermediaries. The investor is one step away from the firm, the controls are another step away, and the evidence that any of it is being overseen sits in MI packs and sampling files that the firm itself did not produce. Delegation is contractual. Accountability is not. That gap is where most asset-management engagements begin.

Specialist lenders, niche banks and bespoke regulated firms run models that do not map onto generic AML guidance. The product is unusual, the customer journey is specific to it, and the supervisor's reference points are drawn from larger, more standardised firms. Proportionate controls have to be designed for the business, not borrowed from someone else's. In practice that means the policies, the BWRA and the operating procedure all have to describe the same firm, and the file evidence has to match the conversation an experienced reviewer would have with the team that runs the product.