Tangos AI Appoints Financial Crime Expert Oonagh van den Berg as Chief Evangelist

Tangos AI has appointed Oonagh van den Berg as Chief Evangelist to bridge the gap between autonomous investigation technology and the practical needs of compliance teams. As financial institutions move from AI experimentation to demanding defensible, auditable outcomes, van den Berg’s 24 years of regulatory and banking experience will guide the platform’s integration into complex investigative workflows.

What was announced

Oonagh van den Berg joins Tangos AI as Chief Evangelist, bringing a background that includes roles at HSBC, Citi, and a legal traineeship with the European Central Bank. She is also the founder of RAW Compliance, a global community of over 17,000 professionals. Her remit at Tangos spans product, sales, and marketing, with a focus on ensuring the platform addresses the manual bottlenecks in financial crime investigations.

The Tangos platform is designed to automate the investigative stage of financial crime compliance, moving beyond simple alert generation to full case resolution. It works by developing hypotheses and gathering evidence across various sources, jurisdictions, and languages. The system produces source-traced, auditable case files that allow investigators to explain and defend their conclusions. This focus on the investigative gap aims to help financial institutions transition from merely detecting potential risks to producing high-quality, consistent outcomes that can withstand regulatory scrutiny. The platform is built to integrate into existing complex compliance environments rather than replacing them, keeping human practitioners in control of the final decision-making process. This move comes as the industry shifts its focus toward the proof phase of AI adoption, where the ability to explain and trust an automated decision is as important as the speed of the technology itself.

The companies involved

Tangos AI is a fintech company focused on the autonomous investigation of financial crime, risk, and compliance. Led by Founder and CEO Eyal Azoulay, the firm has positioned itself as a specialist in the labor-intensive investigative phase of the compliance lifecycle. Unlike many tools that focus solely on transaction monitoring or initial risk detection, Tangos targets the manual process of piecing together evidence and reaching a defensible conclusion.

The company operates in a global market where financial institutions are under increasing pressure to improve the efficiency of their compliance departments without sacrificing accuracy or transparency. By focusing on defensibility and providing source-traced evidence, Tangos aims to address the specific needs of large-scale financial institutions that operate across multiple jurisdictions. The firm’s leadership includes practitioners who have experience within major global banks and regulatory bodies, reflecting a strategy of building technology that is grounded in the operational realities of the financial services industry.

What FF News has reported before

FF News previously reported on the company’s growth trajectory when Tangos Secures $20M Seed Round to Automate Financial Crime Investigations with AI. That report, published in July 2026, detailed how the company intended to use the $20 million in seed funding to scale its autonomous platform. The funding highlight underscored the market's interest in moving beyond basic automation toward more sophisticated, AI-driven investigative tools that can handle the complexity of modern financial crime.

What this means

This appointment signals a maturing of the AI regtech market, moving away from the novelty of automation toward the necessity of regulatory proof. For fintech professionals, the hire of a high-profile practitioner like van den Berg suggests that the next competitive frontier in compliance technology is not just speed, but the ability to survive a regulatory audit. Legacy providers that rely on "black box" logic or high-volume alert generation are likely to face increased pressure as institutions demand more transparent, evidence-based outcomes. The central question for the sector now is whether regulators will fully embrace autonomous case files as a substitute for traditional manual investigations.