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Crime through the financial system is growing 19 percent a year and compliance already costs banks more than $206 billion. A Riyadh platform has just been ranked among the ten global leaders built to fight it.
The scale of the problem was quantified in March. Nasdaq Verafin’s 2026 Global Financial Crime Report, produced with Celent and Oliver Wyman, estimates that $4.4 trillion in illicit financial activity moved through the global system in 2025, an increase of $1.3 trillion since 2023 and a compound annual growth rate of 19.2 percent, far outpacing the world economy. Fraud scams and bank fraud schemes added $579.4 billion in losses, with scam losses growing at more than twice the rate of bank fraud. Financial crime now compounds like a growth industry, and the defence against it has become one of the largest technology markets in finance.
The Price of the Defence
The cost side is equally documented. LexisNexis Risk Solutions puts the global financial crime compliance bill for financial institutions at $206.1 billion a year, based on a survey of 1,181 compliance professionals, and finds that institutions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa carry the heaviest burden of any region, with 72 percent already using analytics and AI in their compliance procedures. The Gulf’s own enforcement cycle has sharpened the stakes. Saudi Arabia became the first Arab state admitted to full FATF membership in 2019, and the UAE’s exit from the FATF grey list in February 2024 followed an enforcement overhaul that reset expectations across the region. Compliance has moved from a cost line to a licence to operate.
A Riyadh Vendor on the Global Grid
Into that market stepped a company from an unexpected address. MOZN, founded in Riyadh in 2017 and built initially on Arabic natural language understanding, launched its FOCAL financial crime suite ahead of a $10 million Series A in 2022. In January 2026, Chartis Research named FOCAL a Category Leader in its RiskTech Quadrant 2025 for both AML transaction monitoring and KYC data and solutions, the highest designation the firm awards, held by only ten vendors worldwide in both categories at once. The evaluation highlighted the platform’s agentic AI for financial crime investigation, and MOZN reports customer outcomes including false-positive reductions of up to 85 percent and case resolution times 70 percent faster. The company serves more than 150 customers, spanning banks, fintechs, insurers and regulators.
“This recognition from Chartis Research reflects the depth of innovation we’ve invested in building technologies that solve real challenges for financial institutions operating under rising regulatory and operational pressure,” founder and chief executive Dr Mohammed AlHussein said at the time, while Chartis analyst Ahmad Kataf noted that the product foundation supports the company’s “continued expansion across global markets.” That expansion now has capital behind it: in August, HUMAIN, the PIF’s AI company, made a strategic investment in MOZN, its first in any Saudi firm, explicitly to fund the platform’s international scale-up.
What the Incumbents Still Own
The honest counterweight is the size of what MOZN is selling against. Nasdaq Verafin alone counts more than 2,750 financial institutions on its platform, representing $11 trillion in collective assets, and the Western vendors that have historically owned this category carry decades of installed trust, validated models and regulator familiarity. Compliance procurement is conservative by design; replacing a monitoring system is a regulatory event in itself, and banks are punished far more severely for a failed migration than rewarded for an efficient one. A ten-vendor ranking opens doors. It does not, on its own, move a core system.
Why the Window Is Open
What tilts the field is that the demand curve and the threat curve are both steepening at once. The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance finds 81 percent of financial services firms already adopting AI in at least one business function, McKinsey projects generative AI unlocking between $200 billion and $340 billion in annual value across banking, and digital payments growing at roughly 15 percent a year keep widening the attack surface. Verafin’s researchers, meanwhile, describe criminal networks using AI to industrialise scams faster than traditional defences adapt. In that contest, a vendor with Arabic-language depth, regional typologies in its training data and a sovereign infrastructure argument holds advantages that are structural rather than sentimental. The next four quarters, with an international push now funded and the first co-developed deployments due, will show whether recognition converts into market share. The crime figures suggest the market will not wait politely either way.
