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From Bank Innovation to Market Leader: How Amess is Revolutionizing Anti-Money Laundering with AI

Most enterprise spinouts struggle to maintain startup agility while leveraging corporate resources. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fabrice Deprez shared how Amess, an AI company spun out of KBC Group, is doing exactly that – and changing how banks fight financial crime in the process.

Choosing the Right Battle

When KBC Group decided to commercialize their internal AI applications, they faced a crucial strategic decision: which of their many AI solutions should they bring to market first? The answer lay in understanding bank dynamics.

“This fight against financial crime is a common fight between all banks,” Fabrice explains. “And this doesn’t bring any commercial advantage… it’s a common obligation to do that correctly, just to keep the trust on the market.”

This insight proved transformative. While banks fiercely compete in most areas, preventing financial crime is a shared challenge that affects the entire industry. As Fabrice notes, “It’s never interesting for a bank to have a big hit on the reputation of a bank near to you because it’s like the domino effect, that reputation won’t reflect on you.”

Building Real AI vs. AI Washing

In today’s landscape where “AI” has become a buzzword, Amess took a different approach. Rather than rushing to market, they invested five years in development and testing before launching their solution.

“The first three years it was purely development and then two years of testing, tuning, until the algorithms were delivering the result that we wanted,” Fabrice shares. This methodical approach paid off in results – their solution can improve detection rates by 3-4x while reducing false positives.

The Problem with Traditional AML

The scale of the challenge is staggering. As Fabrice explains, “We see at many banks that they are struggling with 5-2-7 of true positives. So more than 90% of the work that the people are doing is just a false positive, meaning a work which was unnecessary.”

Even worse, banks only catch a small fraction of actual money laundering. “Banks are struggling with 10-15-20% of detected cases… meaning money launderers have between 5-10 and 20% chance of being caught when they launder their money.”

Going to Market

Rather than seeing their connection to KBC as a liability, Amess turned it into an asset. They’ve already visited 26 banks across Europe, with plans to expand to the US and Canada. The response has been consistently positive because they chose to focus on a shared industry challenge rather than competitive advantage.

This strategy is already showing results. “We already have our first three customers outside the group which is already positive,” Fabrice notes. “We have an outlook of being financially independent as of mid of next year. So two years after launch being profitable.”

The Road Ahead

Amess isn’t stopping with anti-money laundering. They’re building a comprehensive suite of financial crime prevention tools. As Fabrice outlines, “We have a full roadmap of full financial crime which goes from AML fraud and sanctions, cyber protection and everything. So we should have by 26 a full pattern of solutions.”

Their story offers valuable lessons for any technology company spinning out of a larger enterprise:

• Choose battles where collaboration trumps competition
• Invest in real technological advancement rather than racing to market
• Turn your corporate connections into assets rather than liabilities
• Build for the entire industry, not just your parent company

By following these principles, Amess is proving that enterprise spinouts can combine the best of both worlds – corporate resources and startup agility – to tackle industry-wide challenges.