In another stride taken since the historic Abraham Accords’ ratification in 2020, the Gulf Cooperation Council’s first mobile banking solution focused on financial inclusion, NOW Money, has announced its collaboration with the Israeli company ThetaRay, a leading transaction monitoring platform developer.
The collaboration’s aim is to enable NOW Money to prevent financial crimes and money laundering as the number of overbroad money transfers continues to grow: as of Q1 2022, that number was recorded at $780 billion USD.
“There is a huge opportunity in the Gulf to provide mobile banking services and financial education to millions of people who are unbanked or underserved. Our mission is to create a world where everyone has instant and equal access to financial services they can, and want, to use” said Noel Connolly, CEO of NOW Money.
Connolly noted the advantage presented by ThetaRay’s AI-driven machine learning platform, saying that it would “enable NOW Money to process unlimited volumes of transactions, expand the business into high-risk areas and gain the trust of financial partners and regulators worldwide.”
What is NOW Money and what is their newest partnership?
Founded in 2016, NOW Money provides mobile banking services for workers of all income levels, who may have previously found themselves overlooked and underserved. The company gives all customers access to its mobile banking app, providing low-cost financial services including local and international mobile top-ups, use of a contactless Visa card for online and card transactions and cross-border money transfers at the lowest exchange rates.
International money transfers are an important method of bringing money into low-income countries and unbanked communities and are especially critical for many workers who have left their home countries in order to find work and support their families financially from afar.
According to ThetaRay CEO Mark Gazit, the company’s partnership with NOW Money will act as a step toward “eliminating financial injustice against migrant workers.”
ThetaRay’s SONAR solution is based on what it calls “artificial intelligence intuition,” which replaces human bias thanks to its ability to recognize anomalies and find unknowns outside of normal behavior, including completely new typologies. The company boasts that the use of SONAR can reduce up to 99% of false positives compared to rules-based solutions.
“A Gulf fintech choosing AI technology from ThetaRay marks another milestone in the Abraham Accords. We look forward to accelerating collaboration with additional financial institutions in the region.”