Macquarie Invests in Hawk AI to Fuel Global Expansion in Financial Crime Prevention

Macquarie invests in Hawk

Hawk, the leading provider of AI-powered technology for fraud prevention and anti-money laundering (AML), today announced a further extension of its Series B financing, with Macquarie Capital having agreed to join existing investors Rabobank, BlackFin Capital Partners, Sands Capital, DN, Picus, and Coalition. The funding will further accelerate Hawk's international growth, driven by soaring demand for AI-powered anti-financial crime technology. Hawk's explainable AI allows financial institutions to significantly enhance the effectiveness of their financial crime detection and prevention capabilities while ensuring compliance with AML/CFT regulations. "Hawk is a very exciting company. Their AI-centric approach to combatting financial crime is delivering impressive results, while the completeness of their enterprise solution in bringing AML, sanction screening and fraud prevention together really sets them apart from other vendors in this space. We look forward to supporting the growth of the company through our investment and expertise," said Elmar Broscheit, Global Co-Head of Macquarie Capital Venture Capital. "We're delighted that Macquarie Capital has chosen to work with Hawk. The global banking sector has recognized the enormous potential of AI in preventing, detecting, and managing financial crime. Leveraging Macquarie Capital's network and experience scaling successful risk software businesses will enable us to further expand our client base in Asia-Pacific, the US and beyond," said Tobias Schweiger, CEO and Co-founder of Hawk. Hawk's stellar growth continues in 2024. Founded in 2018 by finance industry veterans, the company has rapidly scaled globally and currently monitors or screens billions of transactions worldwide. The company's explainable AI approach has proven to be a gamechanger in the industry, enabling financial institutions to drastically reduce false positive rates compared to traditional AML/CFT solutions, while also detecting more unseen and novel crime. Hawk's modular solution can either enhance or replace traditional rules-based systems with AI-powered transaction monitoring, payment screening, perpetual KYC, and fraud prevention in real-time to deliver greater accuracy and reduced noise.

Hawk Grows Funding to Drive International Expansion

Hawk has expanded its Series B funding amid a new investing partnership with Macquarie Capital. The company, which provides fraud prevention and anti-money laundering (AML) technology using artificial intelligence (AI), said in a Wednesday (July 31) news release that the funding will drive its international expansion efforts. Macquarie joins other investors including Rabobank, BlackFin Capital Partners and Sands Capital, according to the release. "Hawk is a very exciting company. Their AI-centric approach to combatting financial crime is delivering impressive results, while the completeness of their enterprise solution in bringing AML, sanction screening and fraud prevention together really sets them apart from other vendors in this space," said Elmar Broscheit, global co-head of Macquarie. "We look forward to supporting the growth of the company through our investment and expertise." Tobias Schweiger, CEO and co-founder of Hawk, welcomed the partnership and highlighted how it would help the company. "We're delighted that Macquarie Capital has chosen to work with Hawk. The global banking sector has recognized the enormous potential of AI in preventing, detecting, and managing financial crime. Leveraging Macquarie Capital's network and experience scaling successful risk software businesses will enable us to further expand our client base in Asia-Pacific, the US and beyond," Schweiger said in a statement. PYMNTS sat with Wolfgang Berner, the co-founder and CPO of Hawk, earlier this month to discuss how large transaction models (LTMs), or generative AI models adapted to financial crime, can establish more accurate and comprehensive detection and prevention mechanisms. These models are trained to detect novel criminal activities and cut false positives, discerning between authentic activities and illicit ones by detecting patterns and anomalies. "The LTM is a booster for what we've been doing over the years, enhancing our ability to reduce false positives and find more crime," Berner said. The company introduced new fraud detection tools early in July, which are capable of spotting risk by identifying links between data points. Its Entity Risk Detection module combines entity resolution and network analysis with real-time risk identification, PYMNTS reported July 3. The module consolidates datasets and customer profiles, helping clients detect risk and complete investigations.