Certa has announced a partnership with Castellum.AI, a global financial crime risk platform, to extend its third-party management platform. Where Certa partnered with EcoVadis last year to help organisations manage and attain their ESG goals, this partnership integrates the Castellum.AI risk screening in Certa’s third-party risk management platform.
The Castellum.AI platform helps organisations conduct risk screening for customer onboarding and KYC requirements. Importantly, it will deliver Certa clients with global coverage through its API and provide audit trails. Its sophisticated system reduces false positives. Castellum.AI believes that out of the box, the solution reduces false positives to below 5% without any tuning that might be required for certain industries.
Jag Lamba, CEO and founder of Certa said, “At Certa, we are committed to making customer and supplier onboarding as effortless as possible. By bringing Castellum.AI’s data into our AI-powered platform, compliance and risk professionals can quickly and easily bring on third parties with confidence that they aren’t also welcoming financial crime risk.”
What will this deliver to Certa users?
The integration to Castellum.AI will provide procurement users of the Certa platform with immediate access to accurate information on addresses, sanctions, export controls, adverse media, beneficial ownership, and other financial crime risk data. It enhances the global AML requirements and ensures that customers and suppliers meet compliance requirements for the organisation within the territory they are working.
With the direct integration into Certa, procurement professionals only need a single solution to conduct a comprehensive search. Without having to turn to multiple tools to extract all the necessary information. Castellum.AI maintains lists of individuals or corporations sanctioned by different governments from around the world. For example, it has a list of 11,206 individuals, 3774 entities, 160 vessels and 102 aircraft sanctioned with regards to Russia alone.
Certa users will be able to identify whether any individuals or entities a procurement team is working with. Or if the vessel or aircraft carrying your cargo is on a sanctions list anywhere in the world.
Peter Piatetsky, CEO of Castellum.AI, commented, “We’re very excited to announce this partnership with Certa. By integrating our data with Certa’s TPRM solution, we’re able to provide compliance and procurement professionals with the most accurate and reliable vendor risk insights, updated every five minutes. Now they can identify risks like forced labor, export controls, or other reputational risks as part of an automated vendor onboarding process.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
For Certa, this extends its platform further. It comes a couple of months after it raised $35 million in a Series B funding round led by Fin Capital and Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India. Castellum.AI only completed its seed funding round in June, raising $4 million, led by Spider Capital.
While this is currently just a partnership, a bolder move might have seen Certa invest in Castellum, perhaps with an intent to acquire the company. However, while Castellum.AI does operate in the enterprise space, it is also looking to grow its SMB base and support NGOs, journalists and researchers with its financial crime data.
Both companies benefit from the relationship. With Certa enriching its product and Castellum.AI gaining access to a new customer pool for its offering. The risk for Certa is that Castellum.AI ends up being acquired by another company, even a rival, and then has to seek an alternate solution. With a partnership and hopefully a contract in place, that risk should be minimised for the immediate future.
