RelyComply expands into the UK
London, UK: Wednesday 8th October 2025; 07:00am
RelyComply, a South African founded anti-financial crime platform, specialising in Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know-Your-Customer (KYC), and Know-Your-Business (KYB) processes, has announced its launch in the UK. It plans to vastly overhaul how financial crime is combated across the country.
The award-winning, end-to-end platform significantly decreases the likelihood of financial crime through its ability to provide an enhanced identity verification, with integrated bias mitigation and region-based government identification capabilities, perpetual KYC, and enhanced transaction monitoring capabilities through its AI and Machine Learning (ML) models.
This expansion to the UK will allow the business to join the new wave of regtechs focused on global problems that may not be considered ‘flashy’, yet can quietly save financial institutions and fintechs millions, even billions, of pounds.
Bradley Elliott, CEO of RelyComply, said: “Trust is in our DNA, and it is what our platform underpins – trustworthiness. The UK is becoming a hotbed for financial crime and desperately needs modern solutions. The sector is slowly facing the reality that fintechs are now operating at the same scale and risk level as traditional banks, but are still playing catch-up. This will only bring more sorrow to an industry dealing with tens-to-hundreds of millions of pounds in fines relating to financial crime, and institutions relying on fintech M&A in recent years to prove shareholder value in a less than desirable investment environment.”
In today’s market, the urgent need to have robust AML and KYC/KYB processes in place is compounded by an institution’s duty, with pressure from governing bodies, to better support its customer-base, especially those considered vulnerable.
As financial crime becomes a much more sophisticated affair in the UK (with criminals stealing £1.17bn through fraud in 2024, and banks preventing £1.45bn), the FCA has responded by overhauling the regulations protecting customers, whilst financial institutions and fintechs deal with the rise in fines for AML and KYC failures. Failure to Prevent Fraud, APP Fraud Reimbursement Regime and Consumer Duty have all rolled out over the past 26 months, yet these regulations will take time to yield significant results for those impacted the most.
Bradley Elliott continues: “This is a clear signal that reactive controls are not enough. Financial Crime has become a headache for the majority of Financial Institutions (FIs) and fintechs still using legacy, rules-based compliance tools that generate biased, false positives. Reimbursing victims is liability management; preventing fraud is protection. The cheapest fine FIs will ever get is the fraud they never let through. With cross-industry data and explainable AI, RelyComply helps PSPs and banks stop fraud before it starts. For those who can’t prove fairness for vulnerable customers, they can’t meet Consumer Duty. We eliminate that bias in onboarding and monitoring, ensuring every customer gets a fair chance.”
FIs such as Standard Bank, Africa’s largest bank (in AUM), and market-leading fintechs in the Southern Africa region have already utilised RelyComply’s platform, reducing false positives by 40%, compliance costs by 30%, and customer onboarding times by up to 300%.
Whilst some may mistake compliance for being boring, the increase in column inches dedicated to fines proves this notion wrong, with concerns in the UK around improper AML and KYC piquing people’s interest more widely. Poor compliance has taken a global stage in recent years, with an influx of well-known television and podcast series focusing on individuals committing financial fraud, deriving from criminal activity (including RelyComply’s own financial crime podcast – Laundered).
Bradley Elliott continues: “RelyComply won’t be content with rebuilding the wheel; the purpose is to deliver a holistic platform that FIs can implicitly trust without doing the legwork needed throughout not just compliance, but risk as an entire function. There is no reason why identifying potential opportunists for financial crime can’t be painless. With all the work we have done in Africa, and within our home in South Africa, where even the country as a whole is working hard towards leaving the greylist and becoming more financially trustworthy. We are confident in our ability to add value to the UK’s financial ecosystem from London to Edinburgh, and everyone in between, and we are all very excited to be joining such an innovative community.”
