In a conversation with Brad Levy, chief executive of ThetaRay, a company focused on the “wiring” of trust through AI-powered monitoring that helps banks and fintechs scale safely while detecting and reporting financial crime, we examined what this speed means for risk, regulation, and trust in the financial system. 

Levy argues that old ways of tracking money flows no longer hold up.

Nigeria’s banking and fintech sector has expanded, almost faster than the systems built to regulate it. Payments now move in seconds, and fraud patterns move just as quickly. 

Regulators are responding with stronger policies and expectations.

For Levy, the transition is apparent. Systems built for manual checks cannot keep pace with today’s transaction volumes or the complexity of digital crime networks. He describes a system under stress, where scale has exposed the limits of human-led monitoring.

Across banks and fintechs, the gap in readiness varies. Some institutions are already adopting artificial intelligence and real-time oversight. Others still rely on older compliance models that struggle to connect customer data with live transaction behaviour.

The Central Bank of Nigeria’s recent direction on automated anti-money laundering (AML) systems sets a firm line, forcing the industry to move from gradual improvement to immediate action. Institutions now have to rethink how they see compliance, not as a back-office task, but as core infrastructure.

In this interview, Levy, who has spent his career building the plumbing of the global financial markets, first with nearly two decades at Goldman Sachs, then leading Symphony and MarkitSERV, explains what has changed, what still slips through the cracks, and why Nigeria’s approach may affect how digital finance is policed far beyond its borders.

TE: The Central Bank’s move makes automated AML systems effectively non-negotiable. From your vantage point, what changed in the risk sector to push regulators from guidance to outright mandates? 

Brad Levy (BL): The math simply stopped working for manual oversight. Nigeria has one of the most vibrant digital payment ecosystems in the world. You can’t monitor millions of instant transactions using spreadsheets and human eyes. 

The CBN’s March 2026 mandate recognises that guidance doesn’t stop automated, bot-driven crime. By mandating these systems, Nigeria is making a strategic move to protect the integrity of the Naira and ensure the country stays effectively connected to the global financial map.

TE: You’ve worked closely with financial institutions in Nigeria, where do most banks and fintechs actually stand today in terms of AML capability, and how wide is the gap? 

BL: The divide is significant, though it’s closing fast. We see forward-leaning institutions like Sterling Bank already moving toward a future-proof posture by putting AI at the centre of their monitoring. On the other hand, plenty of firms are still stuck in a “box-ticking” mindset.

The gap is most obvious when you look at the CBN’s anti-money laundering automation mandate. Most legacy systems can’t provide a unified view of the customer or link KYC/KYB data to transaction behaviour. 

The 18-month window for banks is tight, but the real pressure is the three-month requirement to submit a roadmap. If financial institutions haven’t started their gap analysis yet, they’re already behind.

TE: There’s a lot of talk about AI in compliance, but in practical terms, what kinds of financial crime patterns are still slipping through traditional monitoring systems that AI is better at catching? 

BL: Traditional systems are built on rules. They look for what we already know, like whether a transfer is over a certain dollar amount. Modern criminals have moved past that. They use smurfing or complex networks of mules to make illicit flows look like normal, low-value activity. AI catches the anomalies. 

It identifies patterns that look wrong even if we haven’t seen that specific tactic before. For a bank, it’s the difference between chasing 5,000 false alarms and actually finding the criminal network hidden in the noise.

TE: For Nigerian institutions, this goes beyond a tech upgrade to an operational shift. What are the biggest implementation challenges you’re seeing on the ground, especially around data quality, cost, and internal expertise? 

BL: The biggest hurdle is fragmented data. AI is only as good as what you feed it, and many institutions have their KYC data sitting in a different silo than their transaction logs. There is also a lingering perception that compliance is just a “tax” on doing business. 

I argue it’s a strategic asset. When you use AI to reduce false positives by 90%, you aren’t just satisfying the CBN; you’re making the entire bank more efficient. Your investigators can finally focus on real risks instead of low-value busywork.

TE: Do you see this directive as a Nigeria-specific response or part of a regulatory change across Africa? And how might it reshape expectations for cross-border transactions over the next few years? 

BL: Nigeria is the blueprint for the continent. We’re seeing similar shifts everywhere, from the EU’s new AML Authority to tightening rules in the US. This is Nigeria’s “mobile phone” moment. Just as the continent skipped landlines to go straight to mobile, Nigeria is leapfrogging the failing, manual era of compliance. 

By hard-coding AI and transparency into the banking system, Nigeria is making itself a much safer destination for global capital. This mandate turns compliance into a bridge for international trade rather than a barrier.

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The menace has become so proliferated and sophisticated that Nigeria has already lost N5.5 trillion to fraud and cybercrimes in 10 years, according to Deloitte. The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) estimates that Nigeria loses about $500 million a year to cybercrime.

However, with the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) cybercrime could be mitigated and brought to a minimum. 

Recently, ThetaRay organized a fintech event in Lagos, a gathering that had in attendance AML, risk, and compliance officers, leaders, and managers at banks and fintechs that want to utilize AI to increase efficiency and efficacy at their companies. 

Shani Golov, Regional Director, Africa, at ThetaRay, discussed the various ways Artificial Intelligence detects and prevents financial crimes such as money laundering and other criminal activity. Other experts like Obi Emetarom, CEO, Zone, and Ibijoke Oyewole, Fintech Consultant, VigiPay, also shared their expertise and knowledge about using AI to prevent financial crimes.

In an interview with TechEconomy, Shani explained that AI has the capability to detect and mitigate the unknown. “Our solution is very sophisticated. It’s dramatically reducing false positive alerts, given the ability to detect unknown cases and the lack of time to investigate. And that actually means that you do less and get more.”

AI Solutions – SONAR

ThetaRay primarily offers AI-driven transaction monitoring technology known as Sonar to help banks and fintechs grow and extend business prospects through dependable and secure international payments. 

ThetaRay’s AML solution, SONAR, uses proprietary artificial intuition machine learning methodology to analyze dozens of risk indicators associated with financial crimes. “So, our solution is actually for monitoring transactions and also for sanction screening.”

This risk-based AI approach paints a clear picture for compliance teams and enables them to detect abnormal activity within large sets of data and to effectively calculate and pinpoint transactions indicating suspicious activities.

As a result, SONAR can deliver 95% of investigation-worthy alerts. ThetaRay’s process also provides insights on customer identity where KYC information is lacking, creating risk profiles for non-customers and transparency across complex paths. 

Explaining in detail how Sonar works, she explained that the solution has the capability to learn the normal behavior of clients and detect any abnormal behavior. Shani added, “You don’t need to predefine any rule. The system has the liberty to simply detect any behavior that is not in correlation to normality.”

Partnerships 

ThetaRay has strategic partnerships with companies like Zone, VigiPay, etc. Both payment operators  partnered with ThetaRay to protect their businesses against money laundering, sanctions violations, and other risks. 

For VigiPay, the agreement will see ThetaRay implement its SONAR AML solution to shield VigiPay’s services through cloud-based transaction monitoring to detect early signs of fraud activity. 

VigiPay believes the partnership will unlock sustainable growth by ensuring regulatory compliance and consumer safety as the company continues to expand the volume and value of its processed transactions.

ThetaRay AI technology is instilling a new standard of trust into the growing world of online payments, enabling fintechs’ rapid revenue growth by opening doors to business with new financial partners worldwide.

Responding to questions on the partnership with Zone, a payment infrastructure company running on blockchain technology, Shani said, “Yes, there is an ongoing partnership, and Zone seems to be the first customer we engaged with, if I’m not wrong, and as you know, they do have a blockchain platform. 

She said Zone enables financial services through its blockchain platform. “And we are there to support their payment, to be trusted to be very safe, and to make sure they are not involved in any illegitimate activity.”

Nigeria’s National Blockchain Policy

The Nigerian government last week approved a new national blockchain policy aimed at institutionalizing blockchain technology in the country’s economy and security sectors.

Blockchain technology makes it possible to develop decentralized applications and new business models that will improve transactional transparency, supply chain security, and record-keeping efficiency across different sectors.

Reacting to this development,  Shani said, “I think we can see this happening all over the world. So as I mentioned, regulators are now putting more focus on fintechs, specifically blockchain and digital assets, which are not regulated at all.

“We will start to see tomorrow that more and more regulators will come with announcements like we saw yesterday from the government, and we are there to support them. We also work with governments in Africa. So, I think we’re very familiar with this.”

The post ThetaRay Advocates Mitigating Financial Crime through AI appeared first on Tech | Business | Economy.

Headquartered in Lagos, Zone serves large commercial banks, payment fintechs, digital banks, and OFIs with real-time, low-cost settlement of both fiat and digital currencies for domestic and cross-border payments.

Through the agreement, ThetaRay will provide Zone the SaaS-based SONAR AI solution that can detect and prevent the earliest signs of sophisticated attempts to launder money or circumvent financial sanctions and watchlists. The solution will help Zone ensure it fully complies with regulatory AML requirements and increase its growth opportunities by providing a trustworthy and secure service.

The new collaboration highlights ThetaRay’s expansion in Nigeria’s fintech payments market.

Zone is Africa’s first decentralized or peer-to-peer payment network based on blockchain technology, which allows payment transactions without dependence on intermediary switches. The decentralized architecture and the underlying technology enhance reliability, eliminate customer disputes, reduce the cost of operations, and automate back-office reconciliation. The network is a true web-scale infrastructure with a capacity for transaction processing throughput of over 50,000 transactions per second.

“We are thrilled with our partnership with ThetaRay, a collaboration that represents a significant step forward in our vision to become one global network to pay anyone, through any means, in any currency, in the most efficient and secure means possible,” said Elendu Uche, Co-Founder/Chief Operating Officer.

By integrating with ThetaRay, we have enhanced our security measures and improved our regulatory compliance whilst providing faster transaction processing for our users within our decentralized payment network. We look forward to working even more closely with ThetaRay to continue delivering frictionless operations and reliable transactions to our customers.”

As Africa’s largest economy with a population of 200 million, Nigeria is home to Africa’s largest fintech ecosystem and more than 200 fintech companies. The country’s youthful population has driven Nigeria’s thriving fintech sector, increased smartphone penetration, and a focused regulatory drive to increase financial inclusion and cashless payments, according to the McKinsey research firm.1 The booming fintech market is helping improve financial inclusion in Nigeria, where more than 40 percent of the population is unbanked.

“Zone is leading Nigerian fintech innovation with a platform capable of revolutionizing the financial system through inclusive services that positively impact people’s lives,” said Mark Gazit, CEO of ThetaRay. “By deploying sophisticated AI technology to monitor and screen payments, Zone will embed the trust into its services, enabling it to grow volume, revenues and ecosystem partners.”

ThetaRay’s award-winning SONAR solution is based on a proprietary form of AI, artificial intelligence intuition, that replaces human bias, giving the system the power to recognize anomalies and find unknowns outside of normal behavior, including entirely new typologies. It enables fintechs and banks to implement a risk-based approach to effectively identify suspicious activity and create a full picture of customer identities, including across complex, cross-border transaction paths. This allows the rapid discovery of both known and unknown money laundering threats.

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MFS Africa will now gain access to ThetaRay’s SONAR SaaS solution, including AI-powered AML transaction monitoring and sanctions list screening, enabling it to stay a step ahead of complex and emerging financial crime typologies, and increase growth opportunities with a trusted and secure service.

MFS Africa has made significant acquisitions in the past year, acquiring Baxi, a leading super-agency network in Nigeria, and the US-based fintech GTP, a top processor of prepaid cards across the African continent.

“As MFS Africa continues to expand its business across Africa and focuses on enabling new use-cases, ThetaRay’s advanced platform assures the company an efficient and effective solution that can support our increasing payment volumes, while reducing exposure to risk from financial crimes,” said Patrick Gutmann, Managing Director of MFS Africa.

MFS Africa’s full-service digital payments network connects over 400 million mobile money wallets, over 200 million bank accounts and over 150,000 agents to enable cross-platform and cross-border payments for remittance companies, mobile network operators, banks, non-bank financial institutions, and global merchants.

“Moving from a rules-based solution to a sophisticated AI platform is a game-changer for compliance, thanks to its new breed of intelligence that drastically reduces false positives and enables us to detect unknown cases,” said Funmi Dele-Giwa, General Counsel and Head of Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) at MFS Africa.

“We take our role in safeguarding the integrity of payments systems very seriously, and this partnership with ThetaRay exemplifies our approach to a strong governance and control environment.”

“MFS Africa is leading the fintech revolution in Africa by enabling digital payments that are accessible to connect all people to the financial world,” said Mark Gazit, CEO of ThetaRay.

“ThetaRay is thrilled to partner with a forward-thinking company whose strategy is to provide new technology that helps open the financial ecosystem and promote financial and economic inclusion. ThetaRay’s advanced AI enables the trust needed by new financial players to be accepted into the system, helping grow business and revenues.”

SONAR is based on an advanced form of AI called “artificial intelligence intuition” that makes better decisions with no bias or thresholds, offering customers a risk-based approach to effectively identify truly suspicious cases and create a full picture of customer identities including across complex, cross-border transaction paths.

This enables the rapid discovery of both known and unknown money laundering threats, with a peerless 95% detection rate and up to 99% reduction in false positives compared to rules-based solutions.

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