Aresbank, a specialized corporate and trade finance bank focused on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, has selected SymphonyAI to strengthen its transaction monitoring framework across trade finance and correspondent banking.

Headquartered in Madrid, Aresbank manages risk and moves money across some of the most sensitive trade corridors between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Operating in a highly regulated environment, the bank centers its business on trade instruments, including correspondent banking, documentary credits, international guarantees and multi-currency credit lines that connect European and MENA markets.

SymphonyAI, a global leader in Vertical AI applying industry-specific artificial intelligence to sectors including financial services, offers a financial crime compliance platform that already spans retail, commercial and correspondent banking. Aresbank has selected the vendor's transaction monitoring capabilities, delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, to replace controls that are only partially automated and operationally intensive. Once deployed, the platform will support oversight of billions of euros in correspondent banking activity each month, alongside the bank's trade finance transaction monitoring.

"Our controls were only partially automated and operationally intensive, and they could no longer keep pace with the oversight our regulators expect across trade finance and correspondent banking," said Isabel Tobares, Head of Compliance, Global Risk Control at Aresbank. "The future of AML is not about doing more controls. It's about making our controls smarter through automation, data, and technology. SymphonyAI gives us a platform built for our business, not a retail template, and one we can scale as our compliance requirements evolve."

Correspondent banking, in which banks provide payment and other services to one another across borders, carries a distinct risk profile, and trade finance flows in the region remain a focus for regulators concerned with sanctions evasion and trade-based money laundering — a practice in which the value of goods in trade transactions is misrepresented to move funds across borders. Trade-based money laundering is a long-standing priority for global AML standard-setters such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), and sustained scrutiny of cross-border corridors has contributed to a documented decline in correspondent banking relationships worldwide, making the quality of a bank's transaction monitoring directly relevant to its ability to keep those corridors open.

Through this implementation, Aresbank aims to:

• Improve consistency and transparency across financial crime operations
• Enhance regulatory readiness with a modern SaaS platform
• Strengthen oversight as its correspondent banking and trade finance business grows
• Build a scalable compliance foundation to support future growth and regulatory change
• Reduce review hours and accelerate trade finance transaction processing

The platform gives Aresbank a foundation designed to adapt as new regulations and transaction types emerge, without requiring a system overhaul each time, according to the company. How the deployment performs against the bank's own stated benchmarks — reduced review hours and faster trade finance transaction processing — is the near-term measure to watch as the engagement moves from selection into production.

"Aresbank's business doesn't look like a typical retail bank, and that's exactly the point," said John Edison, President of Financial Services, SymphonyAI. "Our platform is built to support the full range of banking business models, from correspondent banking to trade finance, not just retail compliance. For Aresbank, that meant combining detection rules from both our retail and correspondent banking models into a single solution, then tuning it to reflect the bank's role as a bridge for trade between Europe and North Africa. This deployment deepens our presence in Iberia and shows how the same financial crime platform trusted by many of the region's largest banks can be adapted to a specialized institution with a very different risk profile."

Trade finance compliance poses different challenges than retail: monitoring has to account for the documents, counterparties and jurisdictions behind each letter of credit or guarantee, not just transaction velocity or amount. That distinction is central to why Aresbank's deployment relies on a platform purpose-built for correspondent banking and trade finance, rather than a retail system adapted after the fact.