How Apex Fintech Solutions elevate financial crime prevention

Look under the hood of some of the world's most popular investing apps, and you'll find Apex Fintech Solutions. Recognized as one of the most innovative companies in the world, Apex serves over 220 clients, including many nontraditional, consumer-facing financial companies — , such as online broker-dealers, traditional wealth managers, wealthtechs, professional traders, and consumer brands.

Its business revolves around validating, executing, and finalizing transactions between buyers and sellers in a financial market.

When an individual investor buys a stock or other financial instrument through an online broker, Apex acts as the behind-the-scenes engine. It withdraws the cash from the investor's account and ensures , ensuring that the money reaches the seller and that the buyer receives the shares they purchased.

Apex serves many blue-chip brands and is a key enabler for fast-growing fintech firms in the trading space, such as Ally Invest, SoFi Wealth, Public.com, and Webull. By helping these companies deliver seamless digital experiences to customers – while handling the high volume of transactions they require – Apex has earned the nickname "the fintech of fintechs."

A high volume of highly variable data

As part of fulfilling its clearing serviceservices, Apex maintains a robust financial crime risk management program that ensures compliance with various know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money - laundering (AML) regulations. That means monitoring both its more than 200 + direct clients and its clients' their customers, amounting to 24 million brokerage accounts in alltotal.

An inability to respond quickly to new opportunities

Apex already had an existing a system in place designed to help them stay ahead of financial crime. But unlike a retail bank, Apex has a unique business model and a very diverse client set. Its existing system didn't allow it to move quickly when new opportunities arose – for example, like when the company wanted to add new products or business lines. Apex's existing off-the-shelf, out-of-the-box solution was difficult to tailor and configure. It required a lot of custom coding to accommodate Apex's wide variety of clients. It also didn't integrate well with Apex's other systems.

"At Apex, we pride ourselves on being able to move quickly," says Justin Morgan, head of financial crimes compliance for Apex. "So, we need a system or platform that can keep up with us. The financial crime system we had was like a huge cruise ship, and we needed a speedboat."

Too much manual effort for analysts

The existing system also placed a heavy burden on Apex analysts, forcing them to live in a world of swivel-chair processes while manually performing much of the heavy lifting associated with their investigations.

Analysts also needed a more intuitive way to search, connect, and understand their data across millions of records, without relying on technical teams or complex queries. As case volumes and data sources grew, Apex began looking for a smarter way to augment human expertise with intelligent automation.

Too many false positives

Another challenge: false alarms. With Apex's existing system, 80% of the alerts analysts received were false positives, or cases where a legitimate transaction is flagged as suspicious, shutting down the transaction or locking an account down completely. These unnecessary alerts cost investigators valuable time, lowering morale. And they eroded customer trust, adversely impacting Apex's reputation and image. Many of the canned alerts, such as those pertaining to debit card usage, were not relevant to Apex's business. One solution was to customize these alerts or build new ones specific to a brokerage. But custom code required tech resources from both Apex and the solution provider. Even making small changes to alerts and thresholds was a significant and costly undertaking.

Build, modify, or buy?

All these challenges placed a heap of pressure on Apex, leaving its leaders to face a few broad alternatives: should the company build its own system, adapt its existing one, or bring in a new one system from an outside partner?

Ultimately, Apex wanted to strengthen, not replace, its existing framework, seeking a platform that could evolve with the business and lay the foundation for future AI-driven enhancements as threats and products continued to change.