Hawk, an AI-powered anti-money laundering and fraud prevention technology provider, has appointed Marshall Billingslea as strategic advisor. Billingslea served as US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorist Financing from 2017 to 2021, leading policy on money laundering and terrorist financing. From 2018 to 2019, he served as president of the Financial Action Task Force, where he oversaw the introduction of the first cryptocurrency standards. He later worked as US Special Presidential Envoy for Arms Control. Hawk CEO Tobias Schweiger said Billingslea's experience with sanctions, terrorist financing and FATF standards would help the company strengthen its AI capabilities. The Munich-based firm recently launched solutions using agentic AI for AML investigations and risk screening.

Hawk expands Agentic AI suite with CDD Agent to eliminate bandwidth bottlenecks & enhance regulatory defensibility. New agentic AI solution unifies KYC, AML, and screening data to automate periodic reviews, pre-populate due diligence forms, and eliminate multi-year blind spots in customer risk monitoring. Hawk, the leading provider of AI-powered anti-money laundering (AML), screening, and fraud prevention solutions, today introduced its Customer Due Diligence (CDD) Agent. Expanding Hawk's growing Agentic AI platform, the CDD Agent enables financial institutions to eliminate CDD review backlogs, move from static, time-based periodic reviews toward continuous customer risk assessment, and drive consistency across their customer due diligence process. The US FinCEN CDD Rule, the UK Money Laundering Regulations 2017, and the EU Anti-Money Laundering Directives require financial institutions to monitor customers on an ongoing, risk-based basis. However, analyst bandwidth constraints force compliance operations into multi-year review cycles, often reviewing high-risk accounts only once per year and low-risk accounts as infrequently as once every five years. In between, ownership changes, risk profiles shift, and transactional anomalies go undetected - leaving institutions unknowingly carrying significant risk for years. When reviews do happen, analysts spend most of their time copying data between systems, re-assessing known risks, and writing inconsistent, unstructured notes that create audit exposure. The Hawk CDD Agent resolves these operational, risk detection, and governance challenges by acting as an intelligent, context-aware due diligence assistant. Running on an institution's pre-approved policies and guardrails, the agent ingests data across systems, conducts preliminary due diligence, and hands analysts a pre-populated review complete with structured narratives, AI explanations, and traceable citations. "CDD teams don't need another generic risk scoring tool, and they don't just need faster data entry; they need the capacity to catch and address risk promptly, with the governance to defend every decision," said Wolfgang Berner, CPO and Co-Founder of Hawk. "When analysts spend hours toggling between tools to copy data by hand, review quality suffers, critical risk shifts go unnoticed, and audit trails become fragmented and incomplete. By adding agentic AI to the customer due diligence workflow, we are giving institutions the ability to pull together KYC, screening, and AML signals instantly." "The CDD Agent handles the heavy lifting of data compilation and form population, allowing analysts to focus their expertise on high-value risk judgments while ensuring every decision is fully documented and audit-ready." Core Capabilities and Operational Value * Risk Signal Aggregation: Unifies critical Know Your Customer (KYC) profile updates (such as ownership structures, document expirations, and activity discrepancies) with screening hits and AML transaction alerts into a single, comprehensive risk assessment. * Automated Assessment of Entity Risks and Discrepancies: Cross-references declared KYC profiles against actual transaction behavior, uncovers hidden beneficial ownership and shared registry links, and synthesizes notable activity into an instant investigation summary - replacing hours of manual data gathering with deeper, automated analysis that enables compliance teams to review accounts far more frequently. * Dynamic CDD & EDD Form Population: Fills out standard institutional review templates and forms and automatically triggers Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) the moment elevated risk thresholds are crossed, replacing empty form filling and manual handoffs with a proofread-and-approve workflow. * Network Analysis & Entity Relationship Visualization: Automatically maps and visualizes corporate structures, multi-layered ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) chains, and shared customer attributes based on available customer data and publicly available information like corporate registries and adverse media - exposing concealed risk relationships and indirect exposure that isolated customer records fail to reveal. * Traceable Reasoning & Audit-Ready Citations: Provides structured natural language summaries for all risks identified, backed by clickable citations for fast verification and seamless regulatory examinations. * Enterprise Security & Governance: Works securely and seamlessly with a bank's existing set up. The agent is LLM-agnostic, operates strictly under human-in-the-loop controls, and never closes, escalates, or submits a case without human approval. Data remains protected and is never pooled with other institutions, moved outside the environment, or used to train foundation models. September 29, 2026

How Ebury scaled AML Transaction Monitoring with AI from Hawk. Ebury's Challenge: Improving AML with Rule Control and AI. * Ebury is a global financial services provider, offering payments, collections, and foreign exchange services to corporates and SME clients across international markets. * Its previous rules-based AML transaction monitoring system had limited configurability, restricting the team's ability to swiftly adapt monitoring controls for a rapidly growing, international client base. * Ebury proactively implemented Hawk's AI-enabled AML Transaction Monitoring platform, incorporating advanced anomaly detection and false positive reduction models to continuously evolve its control framework. * Results: Detection precision doubled and false positive alert rates fell significantly, empowering Ebury to scale international transaction volumes with market-leading control capabilities. Maintaining a market-leading compliance framework. As Ebury's global payment volumes and international footprint rapidly expanded, the business sought to upgrade its transaction monitoring capabilities to maintain a market-leading compliance framework. Ebury's existing transaction monitoring setup required vendor involvement for rules updates, limiting the internal team's ability to rapidly fine-tune detection thresholds or customise monitoring logic for increasingly diverse global client segments. To maintain the highest standard of regulatory compliance while supporting ongoing business expansion, Ebury required a self-serve platform that provided direct control over its ruleset. Furthermore, Ebury recognized that advanced AI offered significant opportunities to enhance operational effectiveness. By combining agile rule management with AI capabilities - such as machine learning for false positive reduction and anomaly detection for complex pattern recognition - Ebury aimed to continually elevate its first-line controls to match its growth ambition. Hawk allows Hawk to tailor monitoring logic to a broad range of client profiles and international corridors while leveraging AI anomaly detection to spot emerging risks. This ensures its control framework remains market-leading as Ebury continues to scale globally. Tom Wain, SVP Operations at Ebury The solution: ai-embedded Transaction Monitoring. Hawk's AML Transaction Monitoring platform delivered the agility, oversight, and control Ebury required: * In-house rule agility: Ebury's controls team can now create, test, and adjust detection logic directly through Hawk's intuitive interface. Rules can be tested in a dedicated Production Sandbox and deployed in hours, allowing Ebury to respond swiftly to emerging financial crime patterns without vendor delays. * Segment-specific monitoring: The team can dynamically segment clients by risk profile and geographic footprint, applying precise monitoring logic tailored to distinct client behaviours. * Advanced AI models: Hawk's False Positive Reduction model manages high transaction volumes efficiently, while the Anomaly Detection model surfaces subtle, multi-layered risk patterns that static rules alone cannot detect. Together, these capabilities allow Ebury to support diverse business segments and expand into new markets with complete confidence in its compliance controls. * 46% initial reduction in false positives following deployment, increasing to 60% following model retraining. * Nearly doubled detection precision, increasing the proportion of actionable alerts from 14% to 30%. * Reduced rule deployment timeline from weeks to hours, significantly enhancing agility. * Streamlined scalability, enabling Ebury to expand its international client footprint backed by robust, tailored monitoring capabilities Explainable AI built for auditors and regulators. Ensuring AI decisions are fully transparent and defensible to internal stakeholders, auditors, and regulators was a core priority for Ebury. Hawk's platform provides clear, contextual reasoning for every alert generated, ensuring first-line analysts can interpret, validate, and act on findings immediately. The explainability of Hawk's models gives its team total clarity over why specific alerts are generated. It provides complete transparency for internal governance and regulatory reporting, ensuring Hawk understand and can clearly evidence the logic driving its controls. Tom Wain, SVP Operations at Ebury The user-friendly interface allows analysts to immediately categorise alerts by risk severity and rule type. When new regulatory requirements or emerging typologies arise, Ebury can adapt its monitoring setup in hours, ensuring the control framework continuously evolves alongside the business. The relationship between Ebury and Hawk's teams also contributed to the success of the project. Hawk's deep knowledge of AI implementation gave Ebury confidence throughout the process. About Ebury. Ebury provides payment and foreign exchange services to corporate clients and small and medium enterprises. In 2025, Ebury: - Processed 1.9M+ transactions - Made payments across 228 countries and collected money from 197 - Sent funds in 111 currencies and received funds in 50 currencies To learn more about Hawk's AML Transaction Monitoring solution, request a demo here. September 9, 2026