About Us

Frictionless KYC & AML – Intelligent data to onboard and monitor any business, fast.

Arachnys accelerates onboarding and monitoring by providing the best global KYC and AML data. Enriched, intelligent data on customers enables straight-through processing and means fewer customer touchpoints, less risk and quicker revenue.

Real-time registry and adverse media connections allow you to keep regulators happy while reducing refresh costs and improving customer experience. A suite of APIs allow modular integration into customer lifecycle and case management tools, removing manual processes and reducing headcount.

Founded in 2010, we’ve helped some of the world’s biggest banks avoid regulatory fines, remediation costs and improved efficiency.

Why we started the company

When David Buxton (CEO & Founder) worked as an investigator at Control Risks, one of his biggest projects was supporting risk assessment of companies selling big capital goods – transformers, generators, MRI scanners – to Russian companies.

He realized that the fundamental opportunity for better compliance and investigations was connecting to and bringing together disparate data points that helped customers really understand the risks of counterparties.

At the time, the problem for his clients was that the companies they were selling through were often shell companies, simply used as a passthrough for fraud and bribes. Procurement officers and senior management would channel purchases through the companies to take a personal cut of company or government transactions.

David’s customers needed to understand the risk of this corrupt activity better to protect themselves. Their initial thought was to turn to databases like World-Check, but those databases didn’t at all address the risks David’s customers faced in reality. Customers were incurring huge compliance risk but traditional data sources had a 0% effectiveness rate.

David realized that in fact the data to make good decisions did exist, it was just very difficult for non-specialists to find, and time-consuming even for skilled investigators to gather. In these cases, the most salient data available was actually around beneficial ownership – which helped tell whether or not a specific company was actually adding value in the transaction – and real estate (having a warehouse validated whether there was a real physical role to the company’s involvement or if they were just a conduit for cash).

The rationale behind Arachnys’ foundation was to create a platform for synthesizing meaningful data for risk decisioning processes out of a world of fragmented, sometimes inaccessible data sets.