EXCLUSIVE: “Speed and Risk: Fixing a Hard Equation” – Eddie Low, Eastnets in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

Eddie Low, APAC Channels Manager for compliance solutions provider Eastnets reflects on the challenges and learnings from tackling financial crime in a region where instant payments are the norm

Asia Pacific is the world’s largest and fastest-growing real-time payments region. Markets including India, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong have rapidly expanded instant-payment infrastructure, while cross-border links between domestic schemes are increasing. That growth creates opportunity, but it also reshapes financial crime.

Fraud, mule-account activity, authorised push payment scams, sanctions evasion and cross-border laundering now move at machine speed. Criminals exploit fragmentation across channels, jurisdictions and regulatory regimes, often moving funds through multiple rails and countries within seconds.

For banks, the issue is no longer post-event monitoring. They need to assess risk, screen payments, detect anomalous behaviour and make compliance decisions in real time, without adding friction that damages customer experience. Across APAC, our clients consistently point to rising operational complexity, including:

• • Multiple payment ecosystems running in parallel
  • Rising volumes across domestic and cross-border rails
  • Tighter AML and sanctions scrutiny
  • Scam typologies evolving faster than legacy systems
  • Pressure to cut false positives and manual investigations
  • A growing need for unified visibility across payments, fraud and compliance

Eastnets addresses these concerns with integrated financial crime, compliance and payments solutions that operate in real time across the transaction lifecycle. Its model embeds compliance and fraud intelligence directly into payment operations rather than treating them as separate functions. That enables banks to screen, monitor, detect and respond within the payment flow itself across SWIFT, instant payments, domestic rails and emerging digital-asset ecosystems.

Demand is also growing for unified operating models that connect transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, payment workflows and fraud detection in one environment. One example is Eastnets’ partnership with NewGens, supporting banks across APAC with transaction monitoring, fraud prevention, screening, duplicate detection and payment-workflow automation designed for increasingly stringent AML requirements.

Ultimately, institutions must do more than detect crime faster; they must preserve trust, resilience and regulatory confidence while scaling real-time services across interconnected payment ecosystems. The biggest efficiency gains to emerge from this approach typically appear in three areas.

First, is a significant reduction in false positives. Many institutions still rely on fragmented monitoring environments that generate very high alert volumes. Eastnets reduces unnecessary escalations through more contextual screening, behavioural analysis and intelligent risk scoring, allowing teams to focus on genuinely high-risk activity. Sohar International, for example, reduced its false positives by 67 per cent using Eastnets SafeWatch Screening, cutting investigation workloads and improving compliance efficiency.

Then there are the efficiencies to be realised from faster investigations and workflow automation. Banks like Arab International Bank also want to reduce the burden of manual investigations and fragmented compliance processes. It used Eastnets’ SafeWatch Screening to automate blacklist updates and strengthen compliance controls with much less manual effort, improving efficiency while maintaining stronger coverage.

And last but certainly not least, is the real-time decision-making that the technology allows for instant payments. In this environment, banks cannot rely on overnight batch controls or delayed reviews. Eastnets embeds sanctions screening, AML controls and fraud monitoring directly into payment workflows so transactions can be assessed in line and in real time without slowing processing.

As volumes rise and customer expectations increase, that convergence between payments and compliance is becoming critical. So, efficiency is not just automation. More importantly, it is operational clarity across compliance, fraud and payments teams that have traditionally worked in silos.

Unified framework for crime detection

In APAC, banks are particularly exposed when it comes to cross-border payments, given the region’s complex and high-volume payment corridors across regulatory diverse regions. Correspondent banking is vital to regional and global trade, but it expands exposure to sanctions risk, mule-account activity, layered laundering and trade-based financial crime. Eastnets helps institutions manage this by connecting payments intelligence, compliance controls, trade monitoring and AI-driven analytics in a more unified framework.

A key example is Eastnets’ SafeTrade, designed to detect trade-based financial crime. Trade-based financial crime is often hidden inside apparently legitimate trade documents and invoices, with criminals manipulating pricing, quantities or shipment descriptions to disguise value transfers. To counter this, SafeTrade embeds AI-driven price intelligence into the compliance workflow so institutions can compare declared goods values against country-specific market benchmarks and identify suspicious anomalies such as over-or under-invoicing.

SafeTrade also combines optical character recognition and natural language processing, vessel tracking, transaction monitoring and AI-driven analytics to identify patterns linked to micro-structuring to evade reporting thresholds, coordinated mule-account networks, synthetic or stolen identities, transaction-velocity anomalies, suspicious trade-corridor activity, and phantom shipments and carousel transactions.

“The industry needs integrated, real-time risk frameworks that allow institutions, regulators, payment networks and technology partners to work from a more connected understanding of risk”

Rather than assessing transactions in isolation, these analytics help institutions detect relationships, behavioural indicators and network-level risks. This matters even more as digital assets, tokenised payments and CBDC initiatives evolve across the region. We believe payments, compliance and digital assets must evolve together: compliance needs to be embedded directly into transaction environments from the outset..

In all of this, AI and automation are essential because the scale and speed of financial activity now exceed what manual investigation models can support. Eastnets uses AI and advanced analytics to help institutions prioritise risk, reduce alert fatigue and improve AML and fraud decisions.

The goal is not to replace investigators, but to equip them with better tools for behavioural analytics, abnormal transaction detection, entity and network analysis, intelligent alert prioritisation, automated case orchestration, real-time monitoring across payment channels, and continuous sanctions and compliance screening.

A notable capability is AIDa, the AI Detection Advisory module within SafeWatch Screening. It helps determine whether screening hits are true matches or false positives through post-fact risk scoring and AI-based contextual matching that evaluates name similarity and related entity details.

AIDa is deliberately phased: compliance analysts retain full control to accept or reject AI recommendations, and explainable results show the reasoning behind each score, which is essential for regulatory defensibility. While operationally, Sohar International reduced false positives by 67 per cent with Eastnets SafeWatch Screening, Arab International Bank automated sanctions and blacklist updates, reducing manual effort and improving consistency and speed.

Future development includes automated closure of confirmed false positives to reduce manual workload further. Eastnets is also investing in SafeWatch AML capabilities such as suspicious activity, customer segmentation, behaviour drift and anomaly models, along with AI-powered threshold calibration and strong model explainability to reduce false positives while keeping outputs actionable and audit-ready.

Responding to convergence

One of the biggest global shifts is the convergence of payments, compliance, fraud prevention, identity and digital infrastructure into a single operational ecosystem. It shapes Eastnets’ innovation strategy in APAC and beyond. A strong example of that is Eastnets’ partnership with AIDa, which combines compliance and transaction intelligence with advanced biometric ID verification, helping clients meet the growing focus in APAC on identity assurance in instant payments.

Another of Eastnets’ major innovations is the Universal Case Manager (UCM), a cross-product, case management solution designed to unify investigations across screening, AML, KYC and payments. It correlates alerts across domains, supports service level agreement tracking, enables structured escalation workflows and improves regulatory reporting from a single case environment. This is especially relevant for APAC institutions dealing with complex, multi-channel financial crime typologies, where siloed investigations create blind spots.

Looking ahead, there are several themes shaping financial crime prevention in APAC: embedded real-time compliance within payment rails and having an AI-driven network and behavioural risk intelligence are key. We also need to see a greater convergence of fraud, AML and identity controls and unified case management through platforms such as unified commerce management.

Clearly, technology providers cannot solve every issue on their own. More interoperability is needed across cross-border ecosystems and, as digital assets and programmable finance go mainstream, we need regional, integrated, real-time risk frameworks that allow institutions, regulators, payment networks and technology partners to work from a more connected understanding of risk.

As payments become faster, interconnected and digital, financial crime prevention must be equally intelligent, coordinated and real time, not only in APAC but globally

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue #38, Page 38-39