Socure Impact Stories: How One Investment Platform Killed 700,000 PEP Alerts (and Saved $1M)

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Here’s a line no Chief Compliance Officer wants to hear: “It’s going to cost you over a million dollars to clear your backlog of alerts.” 
For one leading investment platform with more than 700,000 unreviewed PEP alerts piling up, this was their reality. 
But instead of spending money on a one-time fix, they solved the problem by eliminating the root cause of 98% of those alerts (which were actually false positives). 
And they did it while strengthening their compliance program — not weakening it.
<h2>The PEP Challenge: High Stakes, High Cost</h2>
Let&#8217;s talk about PEPs for a moment. The <a href="https://www.fatf-gafi.org/en/publications/Fatfrecommendations/Peps-r12-r22.html">Financial Action Task Force puts it simply</a>: these are individuals &#8220;entrusted with prominent public functions.&#8221; Sounds straightforward, right?
But here&#8217;s the catch: these aren&#8217;t just important people — they&#8217;re high-risk customers that demand extra scrutiny. Why? Because they&#8217;re prime targets for money laundering, corruption, and bribery schemes. 
Miss one, and you&#8217;re looking at potential regulatory issues. Flag too many false positives, and you&#8217;re wasting precious resources.
&#8220;It&#8217;s a delicate balance,&#8221; one Chief Compliance Officer told us. &#8220;You need to catch every true PEP, but you can&#8217;t tie up your entire team chasing false positives. Each alert takes time, resources, and skilled analysts to review.&#8221;
<h2>The Compliance Nightmare</h2>
Picture this: Your sanctions screening runs smoothly, but your PEP screening creates an avalanche of alerts your team can&#8217;t handle. Every day, the backlog grows. Every new customer means more potential matches to review. Your analysts are drowning in false positives instead of investigating real risks.
That&#8217;s where this platform found itself. With 700,000 unreviewed PEP alerts, they needed 28,000 consultant hours at $50/hour to review them all.
<h2>Game-Changing Transformation</h2>
What happened next transformed their entire compliance operation. Using <a href="https://www.socure.com/products/global-watchlist">Socure&#8217;s solution</a> with even the most conservative matching criteria, that mountain of alerts began to melt away. 
The 700,000-alert nightmare shrank to around 14,000 potential matches. 
Those 28,000 consultant hours? Down to 571. And that $1M price tag? It plummeted to just over $28,000. 
But here&#8217;s what really got their attention: they weren&#8217;t just clearing alerts faster — they were catching risks their old system missed entirely. Going from drowning in alerts to having the team focus on actual risk was invaluable.
<h2>The Secret Sauce: Meet Our Three-Pillar Revolution</h2>
After experiencing a demo of Socure’s watchlist solution, one customer said, &#8220;I&#8217;ve never seen anything like this.. It&#8217;s like having a thousand expert analysts working at the speed of light.&#8221;
Here’s how we do it:
<h3>Pillar One: The <a href="https://www.socure.com/blog/introducing-global-watchlist-screening-with-monitoring-solution">Two-Stage Screening Revolution</a></h3>
Traditional screening would flag every &#8220;John Smith&#8221; as a potential match. 
Our system? It thinks like your best analyst, but at superhuman speed.
Stage one tackles names with intelligence that seems almost human. A leading payment provider discovered this firsthand when our system caught something fascinating: a high-risk individual their old system had missed for months because it couldn&#8217;t connect two similar names with two different spellings.  Our neural networks made a connection in milliseconds.
Stage two goes deeper, asking &#8220;Is this actually the same person?&#8221; A major bank learned this the hard way when they discovered a PEP hiding behind five slightly different identities across three countries. 
Their traditional system saw five different people. Ours connected the dots instantly.
<h3>Pillar Two: The AI Engine That Never Sleeps</h3>
&#8220;It&#8217;s like having a compliance analyst who&#8217;s seen every transaction in history,&#8221; one customer  told us. That&#8217;s not far off.
Think about how your best analysts work. They don&#8217;t just match names —&#8211; they understand patterns, connections, and behaviors. Now imagine that expertise, multiplied by billions of data points, working at machine speed.
Our AI caught three sophisticated bad actors for a fintech client in its first week — individuals their traditional system had missed for months. 
But here’s the real magic: it never stops learning. Every screening makes it smarter. Every true positive sharpens its accuracy, and every false positive teaches it what to ignore. With AI explainability, it transforms all available data into natural language insights — helping analysts respond to pre-structured narratives quickly and efficiently, without the need for lengthy investigations. 
This is where intelligence meets language, simplifying complexity and turning data into actionable reasoning that drives faster, smarter decisions. 
<h3>Pillar Three: Risk Controls That Finally Make Sense</h3>
This is where compliance officers usually lean forward in their chairs.
Imagine having complete control over screening parameters, tailored to your unique risk and compliance needs. Granular search policies across different watch lists, score thresholds, and filtering criteria align perfectly with your operations, all within an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. 
Want to handle domestic PEPs differently from international ones? One click. 
Need stricter controls for high-risk business lines? Done. 
Want to eliminate certain types of false positives automatically? Easy.
One global bank used this flexibility to achieve something remarkable: they reduced their U.S. PEP matches by 99.76% while catching more genuine risks than ever before.
<h2>Real World Impact</h2>
For our investment platform client, the transformation went beyond saving over $1M:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><a href="https://www.socure.com/glossary/customer-onboarding">Customer onboarding</a> time dropped from days to hours</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Analysts shifted from clearing false positives to investigating actual risks</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Compliance team morale soared</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Management gained clear visibility into their risk exposure</li>
</ul>
The customer said, &#8220;The numbers tell one story, but watching my team finally be able to focus on real risks instead of endless false positives — that&#8217;s what really transformed our operation.&#8221;
<h2>The Future of Compliance Is Here</h2>
As <a href="https://www.socure.com/glossary/financial-crime">financial crime</a> grows more sophisticated, this combination of AI-powered precision and human-guided controls isn&#8217;t just an advantage — it&#8217;s becoming a necessity. 
For this platform, what started as a $1M+ problem became a complete transformation of their compliance operation.
Think about what this could mean for your program:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Eliminate alert backlogs </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Accelerate customer onboarding </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Strengthen compliance controls </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Maximize analyst productivity </li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1">Enhance risk detection </li>
</ul>
To learn more about how Socure can transform your compliance operations, <a href="https://www.socure.com/resources/ebooks/how-to-evaluate-a-global-watchlist-solution">check out the eBook here</a>.

Socure Impact Stories: How One Investment Platform Killed 700,000 PEP Alerts (and Saved $1M)

Debra Geister

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