In an industry where the vast majority of crypto and blockchain firms are either purposefully evasive of compliance or see it as an unnecessary cost of doing business, Coinchange demonstrated a unique culture of compliance. Following best practices, Coinchange adopted an AML policy that required Fuzzy screening of watchlists beyond just OFAC – from global sanction and Canadian PEP to Regulatory Authority and HIO – they wanted to be an exemplary case of compliance success in their industry.

Coinchange had an incredibly successful product launch in 2022. In fact, their yield products were so appealing that the platform had more than 50,000 registration requests within 10 days of launch. Coinchange quickly realized their existing watchlist screening solution could not keep up with the pace needed to onboard so many new customers. Coinchange’s prior screening service was unable to automate over 60% of client onboarding requests – that is over 30,000 of the fuzzy searches had an average of three name variant matches (‘hits’) per name screened and all required manual review. This meant having to manually clear more than 135,000 hits – a process that would take more than 1,000 person-hours. What made matters worse was that 99% of the hits were being cleared as false positives. The manual process of documenting and storing these false positives was time-consuming and was taking attention away from more important tasks that prevent fraud and financial crime.