Wolfgang Berner is co-founder and chief product officer of Hawk, the Munich, Germany, maker of AI software for anti-money-laundering and fraud checks at banks and payment firms. He leads the products that monitor transactions and screen payments and customers. Read our review of Hawk.
Ten Years Building PAY.ON's Product
He spent more than ten years at PAY.ON, a payment gateway company, as senior vice president of product, building its payment and risk products. After ACI Worldwide bought PAY.ON in 2015 he worked on its ecommerce and fraud products, and in 2018 he co-founded Hawk with Tobias Schweiger, who had also worked at PAY.ON.
Adding AI Without Replacing Bank Systems
Hawk's AML AI Overlay runs on top of a bank's existing monitoring system without replacing it, and ranks the alerts that system produces. "We're seeing remarkable results with the AML AI Overlay," he said at its launch. "It's delivering prediction accuracy in excess of 85%, reducing false positives to less than 15%."
Screening Agents for Compliance Teams
Hawk later added AI agents that prepare or close name-screening alerts under each bank's own policy. "For too long, compliance teams have had to cover for the limitations of fuzzy matching," he said when Hawk launched them.
