Independent AML & Financial Crime Consultancy
Transaction monitoring, investigations, KYC assurance and compliance data tooling — delivered by a practitioner with 18+ years inside UK and European banks, fintechs and crypto exchanges.
Experience built inside
Organisations where our founder has held roles. Listed for context, not as client endorsements.
What we do
Three connected disciplines that cover the full life of a financial crime control — from the first alert, through quality assurance, to the data that proves it works.
Hands-on investigation capacity for firms that need alerts worked properly — with clear rationale, defensible conclusions and timely escalation.
Independent second-line style oversight that finds gaps before an auditor or regulator does — and fixes them at the root.
Practical tooling that turns raw transaction data into insight — built by someone who has used it on live cases, not just designed it.
Sectors
Retail & Commercial Banking
High-street and corporate portfolios
Correspondent Banking
Nested payments, U-turns, stripping
Payments, FX & EMIs
Cross-border flows and settlement
Crypto & VASPs
Onboarding, source of wealth, sanctions
Fintech & Merchant Acquiring
Scaling controls with growth
Credit & Financial Services
Multi-entity ledger oversight
18+
Years in financial crime
13
Institutions served
1st & 2nd
Lines of defence
4
Sanctions regimes — OFAC, UN, EU, HMT
Selected experience
Designed a risk-based approach to investigating correspondent banking relationships, applying nested-payment, U-turn and stripping scenarios to SWIFT traffic.
Assessed rule effectiveness across multiple products, deactivated and tuned ineffective rules, and tested new scenarios in SQL and Excel before roll-out.
Built a VBA-driven workbook to cleanse raw SWIFT data for multinational clients, cutting manual preparation time on every TM review.
Transaction monitoring rules analysis led to the creation of a dedicated team, improving efficiency and reducing investigator workload.
Developed QC procedures and an MS Access case management system, plus standardised investigation templates for bank staff.
Completed CDD and EDD on individuals, entities, trusts and partnerships — verifying ownership, source of funds and wealth, and sanctions exposure.
Created SQL and Power Query templates to extract multi-million-row datasets and surface fraud and money-laundering concerns across a group.
Built dashboards, checklists and templates, and used completed-case data to expose deficiencies and support strategic planning.
Quality-assured high-risk corporates, trusts, pensions and charities, identified policy gaps and designed checklists for every entity type.
Engagements are described in general terms to protect confidentiality.
“Evidence-based reports, clear rationale, defensible conclusions.”
Our approach
Diagnose
We start with your data, policies and case files — not assumptions — to understand where risk is genuinely concentrated.
Design
A proportionate, risk-based plan: scenarios, templates, QA criteria or tooling sized to your firm and regulator expectations.
Deliver
Hands-on execution alongside your team, with evidence-based reporting that will stand up to audit and FCA scrutiny.
Embed
Training, procedures and handover so the improvement outlasts the engagement and your people own it.
Ways to engage
Ongoing access to senior financial crime expertise for MLROs and compliance leads — without a full-time hire.
Scoped pieces of work: backlog clearance, KYC remediation, QA reviews, rule tuning or look-back exercises.
An experienced investigator or QA lead embedded in your team to cover volume spikes or skills gaps.
Bespoke Excel, SQL or Apps Script tools, trackers and MI dashboards — delivered with documentation.
The founder
Founder & Principal Consultant
An analytical, results-driven financial crime specialist with almost two decades inside UK and European banks, payment firms, fintechs and crypto exchanges. Ali has worked both lines of defence — investigating alerts, filing SARs and DAMLs, quality-assuring complex KYC files, tuning transaction monitoring rules and building the data tooling that makes compliance teams faster and more consistent.
Career
2026 – present
Teya
AML Analyst
2024 – 2025
Lowell Financial Services
Management Accountant
2022 – 2024
ClearBank
Transaction Monitoring Specialist
2022
Binance
Onboarding Analyst
2022
Rain
MI & Reporting Manager
2021 – 2022
Handelsbanken
QA Analyst
Questions
From early-stage fintechs and EMIs building their first controls to established banks that need specialist capacity or an independent view. Engagements are scoped to be proportionate.
Yes. Typical work includes file reviews, QA sampling, gap analysis against policy and regulatory requirements, and preparing clear evidence of how risks are identified and mitigated.
Based in Manchester, we work remotely across the UK and internationally, and on-site where an engagement benefits from it.
That is the aim. Every template, workbook or dashboard is documented and handed over, with training for the people who will maintain it.
Contact
Tell us about your monitoring backlog, upcoming review or the control you’re not sure about. A short, confidential conversation is the best place to start.
Manchester, United Kingdom