smartKYC is proud to announce that we have been named the winner of Best Financial Crime Investigation and Reporting Solution at the RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2026 — now in their sixth year and one of the most established benchmarks of excellence in regulatory technology.
The award follows our recent shortlisting across six categories in this year’s awards, and recognises specifically the work we have done to help compliance teams not only conduct deeper financial crime investigations, but evidence them — turning unstructured intelligence into structured, defensible reporting that stands up to internal audit and regulatory scrutiny.
Investigation and reporting — two halves of the same obligation
Financial crime investigation has changed. Five years ago, the conversation was dominated by detection: better screening, sharper false-positive reduction, faster onboarding. Those problems have not gone away, but a second discipline has moved to the centre of every supervisor’s expectations — the ability to demonstrate, in writing, what was investigated, what was found, what was concluded, and why.
Recent supervisory guidance from the FCA, MAS, FINMA, FinCEN and HKMA all converge on a similar standard: investigations must be timely, proportionate, risk-based and — critically — traceable. The decision is only as defensible as the record behind it. Adverse media classifications need rationale. Sanctions matches need disposition notes. Source of Wealth assessments need an evidenced narrative. Network and beneficial-ownership findings need an audit trail.
What this award recognises
The smartKYC platform combines automated open-source intelligence (OSINT) collection with explainable AI to deliver both ends of the investigation cycle in a single workflow:
- Deep, multilingual investigation: federated search across licensed databases, regulatory and sanctions lists, corporate registries, court records and the open and deep web, processed by multilingual NLP across more than 50+ languages with linguistic and cultural sensitivity.
- AI that filters signal from noise: adverse media classification, entity resolution and Network Mapping & Relationship Risk that distinguish genuine risk indicators from informational noise, sharply reducing false positives and review fatigue.
- Structured, defensible reporting: every alert, every classification and every conclusion is traceable to its source citation. Outputs are designed to be reviewed by an analyst, signed off by a manager and produced for a regulator without further reformatting.
- Configurable to the institution’s risk appetite: workflows, risk weightings, reviewer hierarchies and report templates are tailored to each firm’s policy, not imposed by the platform.
- Explainable by design: every AI inference is presented with the underlying evidence, so analysts and supervisors can interrogate how a conclusion was reached, not just what it was.
From A-Team Group
“We are delighted to recognise smartKYC as the winner of the Best Financial Crime Investigation and Reporting Solution in our RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2026. Now in their 6th year, these awards honour both established leaders and innovative newcomers who are delivering measurable excellence in regulatory technology. In a highly competitive field, smartKYC has demonstrated a superior ability to help firms meet their compliance obligations with efficiency and strategic value.”
From smartKYC
“We are honoured to receive Best Financial Crime Investigation and Reporting Solution at the RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2026. Investigation and reporting are two halves of the same regulatory obligation, and the bar for both has risen sharply. To be recognised in this specific category — by an editorial team and Advisory Board that work alongside the institutions we serve — is particularly meaningful. It validates a deliberate choice we made: not to chase generic AI claims, but to build a platform whose every output is traceable, explainable and defensible to a regulator. Our thanks to A-Team Group, to our customers whose feedback shapes the product, and to the smartKYC team who continue to set new standards for KYC quality.”
A year of recognition
This is the second major industry recognition smartKYC has received in 2026, following our recent win of Most Innovative KYC Investigation & Due Diligence at the A-Team Innovation Awards 2026. Together, the two awards point to the same underlying conviction: that financial crime compliance is now an evidence-led discipline, and the technology supporting it must be built for explainability and audit, not just speed.
Our thanks again to A-Team Group, the editorial team and the RegTech Insight Advisory Board. Thank you to the customers — across capital markets, banking and wealth management — whose work and feedback shape the platform every day. And thank you to the smartKYC team, whose continued investment in explainable AI, multilingual NLP and federated search makes this kind of recognition possible.
The full list of RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2026 winners will be published on the A-Team Insight awards page.
See the Award-winning Platform in Action
Through the automation of deep KYC background checks on companies and people, smartKYC uses explainable AI to do the research heavy lifting that a human would normally do — at speed, at scale and across more than 50 languages. Every output is traceable, defensible and audit-ready.
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