NOTO Takes Unified Approach To Financial Crime Prevention

Financial institutions face an increasingly complex challenge: fraudsters are early adopters of new technologies, particularly AI, to create sophisticated attacks. 

At the same time, organisations struggle with fragmented legacy systems that make coordinated defence difficult.

Ivan Stefanov, CEO of NOTO, has spent nearly 17 years in the fraud prevention and payment space. 

The company offers an enterprise financial crime prevention platform that addresses this problem through a unified approach.NOTO focuses on two major use cases: anti-money laundering compliance and fraud prevention. The platform provides a unified, modular, data-agnostic solution.

The AI arms race

Fraudsters are leveraging AI to generate high-quality deepfakes and execute faster, more precise attacks.

This represents a significant escalation in the sophistication of attacks that financial institutions must defend against.

“They’re always the first adopters, the early adopters,” Ivan says. “At the moment, certainly one of the areas of application of AI is generating those deepfakes and forged documents with super high quality.”

NOTO’s response involves enabling customers to apply their subject matter expertise into flexible decision-making flows. 

This approach works throughout the entire customer journey, from initial account opening through to ongoing transaction monitoring.

“Think about it as a funnel of prevention and detection,” Ivan explains. 

“You start right from the beginning of the journey, where you detect some of those illicit actors, and then you continue on login and transactional level where you further continue to slice and peel out all attempted fraud and other illicit activity.”

This layered approach addresses threats at multiple points. Rather than relying on a single checkpoint, the system continuously monitors and assesses risk as customers interact with services.

The legacy system challenge

Many financial institutions operate multiple tools that have been implemented over time. Making sense of this fragmented landscape has become increasingly problematic, even for the organisations themselves.

NOTO addresses this through two main streams, each with three clearly defined solutions aimed at different points in the customer journey.

Organisations can start with whichever module addresses their most pressing problem and build from there.

“You can start with any of them depending on what your burning problem is, or what’s on your roadmap and agenda, and continue to build on that utilising the same API, the same data feed,” Ivan says.

This contrasts with the traditional approach of implementing separate tools for onboarding, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening and fraud detection. 

That model creates what Ivan describes as “a huge mishmash of different tools, functions, and departments”.

The unified platform approach means organisations avoid duplicating infrastructure. 

They implement once and access all features through the same integration points, rather than maintaining multiple vendor relationships and technical integrations.

Balancing security and customer experience

False positives represent a major pain point for financial institutions. Legitimate customers get blocked whilst fraudulent transactions sometimes slip through, creating both security risks and poor customer experiences.

However, Ivan notes that the problem is not always well measured or understood. Organisations looking at large volumes of customer sign-ups and transactions can easily overestimate the scale of the issue.

“Everything has to start with proper reporting and management information to understand the size and the scale and the origin of the problem,” Ivan explains. 

“Are you losing them at the initial stage of onboarding? Are you losing them at the first transaction? Is it a recurring problem that is happening through some of your transfer channels?”

NOTO’s approach enables customers to pinpoint problems through flexible reporting. They can track the performance of their rules at any stage where they monitor and apply real-time decisions.

The platform provides tools, including simulations on historical and live data. 

Customers can retrain models themselves and monitor expected versus actual performance, enabling quick course corrections.

“This is the second stage: your reaction time to changes, which also allows you to be nimble and quick in responding to new fraud patterns,” Ivan says. This agility also helps when false positive rates increase, allowing organisations to maintain acceptable levels without hurting business performance.

Having all functionality within a single platform provides end-to-end visibility of customers. Different financial crime prevention teams can see relevant activity within acceptable policy boundaries.

Compliance teams can be aware of what fraud teams are flagging and vice versa. This integrated approach contrasts sharply with organisations where different teams communicate about the same customers through email or chat.

“If you’re doing things offline through email and chat, then you’re in a world of pain,” Ivan notes.

The cost question

For smaller fintech companies, cost represents a significant consideration when selecting fraud prevention tools. Yet as Ivan points out, this concern isn’t limited to emerging players alone.

“The cost is always a consideration, big or small—the only difference is the ticket size," he says. “By unifying fraud and AML in a single platform, NOTO reduces total cost of ownership—often by 50%—while offering flexible deployment options, from on-premises to software-as-a-service.”

The SaaS model offers consumption-based pricing that scales with usage, while on-premises deployment provides cost predictability for rapidly growing or large customers. 

But regardless of the deployment model chosen, organisations need to think beyond the initial price tag.

Anti-money laundering compliance is mandatory and non-negotiable, dictated by regulatory requirements. 

Fraud prevention, by contrast, is typically viewed as a business problem requiring a positive return on investment.

That return might come through reducing fraud losses, increasing transaction acceptance rates, or improving the speed of customer-related case resolution. 

Ivan argues that using a unified platform helps reduce costs by avoiding the proliferation of multiple solutions.

Organisations don't pay multiple vendors for overlapping capabilities or maintain redundant integrations. 

This consolidation creates savings that extend beyond licensing fees to include reduced technical overhead and simplified operations.

Beyond traditional fraud

The unified platform approach also proves valuable when addressing less obvious threats. Promotion abuse, for instance, costs businesses billions but often flies under the radar compared to traditional fraud.

This includes activities like cashback abuse on financial products or more sophisticated schemes in sectors like gambling. 

These threats require the same rigorous approach as conventional fraud but often get treated as separate problems requiring different tools.

NOTO allows customers to interpret their transaction data for various use cases beyond typical first-party or third-party fraud. 

The platform identifies normal spending behaviour and flags deviations that might indicate loyalty programme or promotion abuse.

“Within the same package, not having to plug in another vendor just for that,” Ivan says. This capability exemplifies how a unified platform can address multiple fraud types without expanding the technology stack.

The same flexibility that enables promotion abuse detection also supports other use cases that organisations identify. 

Rather than being locked into predefined scenarios, customers can adapt the platform to their specific needs.

Configurable compliance

This adaptability becomes particularly important when organisations operate across different markets. 

Each jurisdiction may have specific regulatory requirements, and different compliance strategies may be needed to meet local legislator and regulator expectations.

Traditional fraud prevention tools often impose their own logic and workflows, forcing organisations to adapt their processes to fit the software. NOTO takes the opposite approach.

The platform is fully configurable and data-agnostic. It doesn't impose hardcoded or predefined contexts that organisations must adapt to their specific business, risks and client base characteristics.

“It's the other way around. It's fully configurable from the back office,” Ivan explains. “To us, configuration doesn't equal heavy coding and customisation to make it fit from client A to client B to client C.”

This doesn't mean implementation is instantaneous or effortless. 

Configuration work is required during setup, which is why NOTO provides client onboarding and implementation teams to guide customers through the process.

However, this upfront investment delivers ongoing flexibility. 

The ability to maintain different strategies per market or business vertical represents what Ivan identifies as one of NOTO's unique selling propositions.

This flexibility enables global organisations to meet local requirements whilst maintaining operational consistency. 

A bank operating across multiple European markets, for instance, can tailor its approach to each jurisdiction's specific requirements without deploying separate systems.

Looking ahead

AI continues to dominate conversations about financial crime prevention. However, organisations need clear goals about where to apply it and what outcomes they expect to achieve.

Potential benefits include cost savings, process efficiency improvements or increased speed in handling issues. 

But success requires understanding what can be achieved with different AI approaches, whether large language models or machine learning.

“One thing that remains universally true is that you have to have a clear scope and good input – good data, because if you get garbage in, you get garbage out,” Ivan says.

Organisations are moving towards consolidating different systems into central platforms. Whether labelled as orchestration or unified systems, the trend involves reducing tools into more manageable setups.

Future capabilities will likely include AI agents to reduce manual work and machine learning models to enhance existing rules and policies. 

Success will come from combining these technologies effectively.

“Certainly it's going to be a never-ending iterative process, and NOTO is looking forward to being at the heart of new innovations,” Ivan concludes.