Global Screening Services (GSS), which provides sanctions screening technology to regulated financial institutions, has partnered with cloud engineering company Storm Reply to introduce a new AI-powered cloud capability that accelerates development of its global transaction screening platform.
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The technology enables GSS to make changes to the infrastructure underpinning the platform significantly faster, while maintaining human oversight.
As sanctions regimes grow in scope and complexity, with the FCA recently identifying weaknesses including outdated lists, poor screening configuration and delays in updates, GSS’s innovation will help the industry address sanctions risks more quickly while ensuring service availability.
More than 40 billion cross-border transactions are screened each year for sanctions compliance, often multiple times to meet different regulatory requirements across the jurisdictions through which money flows. Almost 99% of those flagged for further investigation turn out to be false positives, creating extra costs and delays. GSS – which raised over $47m (£37m) in a Series A2 funding round in 2024 – aims to address this challenge, providing a cloud-based, standardised and centralised screening service to eliminate unnecessary screening repetition, frequency of false positives and time to investigate.
Developed with Storm Reply, the new ‘Cloud Guardian’ analyses proposed changes to GSS’s cloud infrastructure before they are released, highlighting those which may require closer attention. It helps engineers distinguish between routine changes and those requiring closer review, while keeping final release decisions firmly in human hands.
This AI-powered capability has reduced preparation for complex infrastructure releases from around two days to less than four hours. Individual reviews which previously took around 30 minutes can now be completed in roughly three, with engineers focusing on the issues identified by the AI rather than manually working through every line of a proposed change.
Adam Clarke, Chief Technology Officer at GSS, said: “This development means we can make changes to the infrastructure supporting our sanctions screening service much more efficiently, while retaining the level of control and trust needed for technology used by regulated financial institutions.
“Sanctions screening has to operate in an environment which is continually changing. We want the platform underpinning it to be able to evolve just as quickly, so that improvements can be introduced without creating unnecessary operational friction or risk.”
Storm Reply, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, worked directly alongside GSS’s platform engineers throughout development building Cloud Guardian as a cloud-native solution on AWS. This included testing how the AI should be instructed, which model could deliver reliable analysis at an acceptable operating cost, and how it should connect into the existing release process.
With Cloud Guardian integrated into GSS’s existing workflow, the business has not needed to replace its infrastructure tools or introduce a separate review process. GSS engineers have also developed the knowledge required to understand and maintain the solution themselves.
Storm Reply partner Rachel Grunwerg said: “The challenge was to help GSS move faster without weakening the controls around a highly important financial services platform. The biggest opportunity for AI here was not to automate the final decision, but to reduce the amount of manual interpretation engineers had to do before they could make that decision.
“That is where we see significant potential for AI across financial services – helping people work through complex technical information faster, while keeping expertise, governance and accountability firmly with those responsible.”