Who Hawk AI is
Hawk AI is a financial crime technology company founded in Munich in 2018 as HAWK:AI, and known today simply as Hawk. Its platform covers AML transaction monitoring, customer and payment screening, customer risk rating and fraud prevention, and it combines rules with AI that explains every score it gives.
Banks, payment companies, fintechs and crypto businesses use it to cut false positives without losing coverage, across fiat and crypto activity. That is why it is one of the monitoring engines our compliance reporting module connects to.
What it does in your platform
Compliance reporting
Checks the transactions your platform books against Hawk's rules and AI, next to the monitoring rules your MLRO sets in the platform. Hawk's alerts become cases in the backoffice with the evidence attached, ready for your team to close, escalate or turn into a suspicious activity report.
How the connection works
One connector in the compliance reporting module talks to Hawk's RESTful JSON API, which takes transactions in real time and in batches where needed. Hawk's credentials stay in your platform's secrets, never in your apps.
A transaction is booked
A card payment, a transfer or a crypto withdrawal lands in the ledger, and the module sends it to Hawk with the customer it belongs to.
Hawk scores it
Its rules and AI check the transaction against the customer's usual behaviour and known typologies, such as structuring, layering and rapid movement of funds.
The score explains itself
Each score comes with the parts of the transaction that deviate from, or match, what is expected of that customer, so an analyst sees why it was raised.
An alert becomes a case
Hawk's alerts arrive in the module's case queue in the backoffice, with the transaction, the customer and Hawk's explanation attached.
Your team decides
An analyst closes the case or escalates it, and when a report is due, the suspicious activity report is prepared in your regulator's format.
The evidence is kept
Every decision is recorded and kept for audit, ready to export for your auditors or your regulator.
Next to other providers
Hawk adds its typologies to the rules your compliance team runs in the platform, rather than replacing them. Alerts from Hawk and from your own rules meet in the same case queue, so your analysts work from one list.
The case queue and the reports belong to the module, not to Hawk, so adding another engine or moving away later does not change your apps, and past alerts stay in your records.
When Hawk AI fits best
A strong fit when
- You want AI on top of your rules, with an explanation behind every score that your regulator can follow.
- Your rules raise more false alerts than your analysts can work through.
- You monitor fiat and crypto activity together, as a bank, a payment company or a crypto business.
Also worth a look
- A blockchain analytics engine such as Chainalysis KYT or Elliptic, when on-chain exposure is your main risk.
- A monitoring provider you already have a contract with: it becomes a connector too.
How we get you live
The contract
We help you get your Hawk account and contract in place, set up for your markets, your products and your licence.
The rules
With your compliance team, we map your transactions and customers to Hawk and agree which typologies and thresholds apply to which products.
The keys
Hawk's API credentials go into your platform's secrets and nowhere else, and no app ever talks to Hawk directly.
A full test run
Test transactions run end to end, from the ledger to a case in the backoffice, before go-live. Later, Hawk's production sandbox lets your team try rule changes on recent history.
