FF News Tattoo Studio: Neterium on Mission-Critical Sanctions Screening

At the FF News Tattoo Studio during Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt, Pascal Aerens explains why he co-founded Neterium in 2018. The pull, says Aerens, is both impact and engineering: preventing financial crime matters and screening payments is mission-critical tech.

He draws a line between batch KYC checks and real-time payment screening. If KYC fails you can re-run it later, however, a live payment sits on the critical path: if the screening engine is down or noisy, money doesn’t move. That makes uptime, speed, and precision non-negotiable for banks. On false positives, Neterium calls it a permanent fight. Even when algorithms improve, watchlists expand and geopolitics can shift so alert volumes creep back, therefore constant tuning is essential.

The spark for Neterium was a technology gap. Many tools 20 years ago relied on pre-cloud and pre-AI approaches however the thesis now is to apply modern AI, big data, parallel computing, to an old problem. Done well, that boosts effectiveness (better hits), efficiency (fewer false alerts), and scalability.

Scalability matters because workloads can spike overnight. Fixed on-premises servers can’t instantly double; but the public cloud can, so screening doesn’t become the bottleneck. Sanctions screening isn’t a checkbox, it’s a real-time, high-stakes system with societal impact that Neterium is modernizing with today’s engineering toolkit.