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How Alma automated PEP-SL alerts and redeployed their compliance team.
In two weeks, without changing their screening tool.
Most alerts
were false positives.
Alma's customer base generated a continuous flow of PEP-SL alerts. At 5–10 minutes of manual review per alert, that load weighed heavily on the Operations and Compliance teams.
The work was simple, but heavy: gathering additional information on the screened entity and the match, then spotting inconsistencies between them. It was necessary, documented work, and typically the kind that saturated operational resources.
And analysts had no margin for error on this process: a wrong decision could expose Alma.
The consequences were twofold: some customers experienced slower onboarding, and senior analysts spent their expertise on cases that didn't need it.
Kolar sits between the screening engine
and the analysts.
Alma's screening engine, built in-house and tuned to their customer base, was already doing its job well. At their scale, even well-targeted screening generates volume. The bottleneck wasn't detection. It was triage.
Kolar plugs in as the triage layer on top of whatever screening stack is already in production. No replacement, no rebuild. Alma's in-house engine stays the source of truth on alerts.
Kolar reads them, runs the enrichment and decision work on the clear false positives, and escalates only the cases that genuinely need human judgment or a follow-up with the customer.
Kolar handles the noise.
Analysts investigate.
Same 5-step process on every alert:
- 01
Enriches the screened entity and the match
Pulls additional context from official registries, sanctions databases, and public sources: exactly the information an analyst would gather manually.
- 02
Confirms regulatory applicability
Determines whether the case falls under French AML scope (ACPR) or can be deprioritized, so analysts don't spend time on out-of-scope alerts.
- 03
Compares against the customer profile
Cross-checks dates of birth, addresses, nationalities, and other identifying data points to spot mismatches between the alert and Alma's customer record.
- 04
Decides per Alma's policy
Applies the same decision logic an Alma analyst would, calibrated on the team's risk appetite and ACPR expectations.
- 05
Justifies every decision
Produces a complete audit trail with the reasoning, sources cited, and decision path, exportable for regulator review or internal handover.
Designed for what Alma's
compliance team actually needed.
Because every alert decision creates regulatory-grade exposure, Kolar was built to meet what Alma's compliance team needed end-to-end.
EU-hosted
Infrastructure and customer data hosted in the EU. GDPR-compliant by design, with no cross-border data transfer.
Complete audit trail
Every decision is traced with full reasoning, sources cited, and decision path. Exportable for regulator review or internal handover.
Calibrated on ACPR
Decision logic aligned with Alma's AML policy and ACPR expectations. No generic playbook: every output is defendable against French regulatory scrutiny.
Weekly control reports
Kolar handles first-line controls and reports them weekly to compliance leadership, building operational trust at every cycle.
Alma's analysts:
from triage to judgment.
Instant alert processing. Teams redeployed to complex cases and other priorities.
PEP-SL handling was a significant operational charge for our 1st and 2nd line teams.
Kolar freed this resource while ensuring complete traceability of the process.
Our team can now focus on the most sensitive cases.
Why Kolar over the alternatives
Alma evaluated other options before Kolar. They all fell down on the same three points:
Alternatives
With Kolar
Same operational drag
on your PEP-SL alerts?
30-minute discovery call. We'll walk through your AML setup and see together which processes are most worth streamlining.
Book a demo