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Anti-Money Laundering & Financial Crime Compliance Solution

Catch the financial crime
network. Not just
the transaction.

Money laundering runs through corporate structures, trade flows, and beneficial ownership chains – not just suspicious wire amounts. Sayari surfaces the network behind the transaction, so your analysts investigate exposure rather than process alerts.

AML risk profile · entity analysis
HIGH
Risk score
High (45%)
Medium (17%)
Clear (38%)
Shell company structure detected
YES
High-risk jurisdiction in ownership chain
3 FOUND
PEP connection (2 hops)
REVIEW
Trade flow anomaly detected
YES
Sanctions list exposure
NONE
3B+
Ownership links
1.4M+
PEPs tracked
250+
Jurisdictions
72%
False positive reduction
81%
Risk tools aren’t integrated
of enterprises say their risk tools aren’t fully integrated – creating blind spots between AML, KYC, and sanctions workflows that financial criminals exploit to move money undetected.
Source: Sayari Global Executive Survey, 2025
What Sayari detects

The red flags buried in ownership and trade data.

Transaction monitoring catches anomalous payments. Sayari catches the structural conditions that make laundering possible – the shell companies, the PEP connections, the high-risk jurisdiction routing.

Shell company structures

Multi-layer holding companies with no apparent operational purpose – particularly in offshore jurisdictions with opaque registries.

High-risk jurisdiction routing

Ownership chains that route through FATF high-risk or non-cooperative jurisdictions, identified at every hop in the traversal.

PEP ownership and control

Politically Exposed Persons holding beneficial ownership – even when ownership is held indirectly through family members or nominees.

Trade-based laundering indicators

Anomalous trade flows – over/under-invoicing, unusual commodity combinations, mismatched counterparty profiles – surfaced through Sayari’s 4B+ trade transactions.

Circular ownership patterns

Entities that own each other – a classic obfuscation technique – automatically detected during beneficial ownership traversal.

Adverse media and prior enforcement

Prior AML actions, financial crime allegations, and regulatory actions surfaced from global news and enforcement databases.

Typology coverage

Built for the laundering methods regulators are prioritizing.

TBML

Trade-Based Money Laundering

Sayari’s 4B+ trade transactions – bills of lading, import/export filings, shipping manifests – enable TBML detection at a scale no other open-source platform matches.

Over- and under-invoicing detection
Multiple invoicing for single shipments
Misrepresentation of goods
Black market peso exchange patterns
Shell Companies

Layering Through Corporate Structures

Automated traversal through 3B+ ownership links surfaces the full beneficial ownership chain – including structures specifically designed to obscure the origin of funds.

Multi-jurisdictional holding structures
Nominee director and shareholder arrangements
Bearer share company detection
Circular ownership and cross-holdings
Real Estate

Real Estate Money Laundering

Cross-reference property holdings, shell company ownership, and PEP connections to identify real estate laundering patterns flagged in FinCEN advisories.

Shell company property ownership
PEP or SDN-connected real estate assets
All-cash transaction indicators
Geographic concentration in high-risk markets
Correspondent Banking

Nested Account and Payable-Through Risks

Screen the full ownership and operational profile of correspondent relationships – not just the bank’s legal name – to identify nested account and payable-through risks.

Respondent bank beneficial ownership
PEP board member and shareholder exposure
High-risk jurisdiction of operations
Prior AML enforcement history
Frequently Asked

Common questions about AML intelligence

Money laundering relies on structural complexity – shell companies, layered ownership, and nominee directors designed to obscure the flow of funds. Network mapping reveals these structures by tracing corporate relationships, beneficial ownership chains, and trade flows across jurisdictions, exposing patterns that transaction monitoring alone cannot detect.

Trade-based money laundering (TBML) exploits mismatches between the stated parties in a transaction and the actual beneficial owners behind them. By resolving beneficial ownership across multiple corporate layers, Sayari identifies when trade flows involve parties connected to sanctioned entities, PEPs, or known money laundering typologies – even when the direct counterparty appears clean.

SAR narratives require specific, source-documented evidence – not risk scores. Sayari provides the underlying corporate records, ownership chains, trade data, and relationship maps that investigators need to build defensible SAR narratives. Every finding traces to a primary source, giving compliance teams audit-grade documentation for FinCEN and other FIU submissions.

Yes. Sayari’s entity resolution maps corporate structures through multiple degrees of ownership and control – identifying nominee directors, shared registered agents, circular ownership patterns, and other structural indicators commonly associated with layered shell company networks. The system resolves these structures across 250+ jurisdictions using primary-source registry data.

Traditional name-matching generates high false positive rates because it cannot distinguish between entities with similar names. Sayari resolves entities using hard identifiers – registration numbers, tax IDs, addresses, and corporate relationships – reducing false positive rates significantly while maintaining comprehensive coverage. Analysts spend their time investigating genuine risk rather than clearing name collisions.

3B+
Ownership links powering
beneficial ownership traversal
72%
False positive reduction
vs. name-string AML screening
4B+
Trade transactions for TBML
detection and analysis

See what’s behind your highest-risk alerts.

Request a demo. We’ll run Sayari’s AML analysis against your actual counterparties and show what the network behind them looks like.

Resources & Insights

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Webinar
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