Company: Prospero Systems AG

Founders: Christian Schaefle (Founder CEO – Recently Retired) / Ruan Scott (Head of Business development) / David Schaefle (Head of Product) / Andrew Tsirkin (Head of Software Development) / Georg Pölzlbauer (Head of Technology)

Headquarters: Vaduz, Liechtenstein, and London, United Kingdom

Most Recent Valuation: Privately owned, undisclosed.

Employees: 11 - 50

Founded: 2010 / 2022

Prospero Systems has roots going back to 2010, when the business first began delivering compliance solutions to financial institutions.

In 2022, under new ownership, the company embarked on a new chapter, with a clear mandate to innovate faster, build a truly unified compliance platform, and bring DetectX to a global market. What you see today is the result of that ambition.

In One Sentence: “Prospero Systems is the company behind DetectX, an award-winning predictive analytics and decision intelligence platform that serves financial institutions with anti-money laundering, know your customer, name screening, fraud detection, and transaction monitoring solutions, while also powering risk and analytics use cases across other industries.”

Top quote: “Patterns exist everywhere in nature, and where there are patterns, there is the power to predict.”

Who are you building your product/service for, and what painful problem are you taking away from their day?

We built DetectX for financial institutions, fintechs, and payment providers that are under constant pressure to detect and prevent financial crime while staying efficient and compliant. Traditional systems are often fragmented, rules-based, and generate high volumes of false positives, slowing teams down and increasing operational costs.

DetectX was built differently. Its core engine combines optimised search, pattern recognition, Natural Language Processing, and Evolutionary Learning to deliver high-precision risk and decision intelligence. Rather than firing rules at data, DetectX learns, adapts, and scores, continuously improving its ability to surface real risk while filtering out the noise. The result is a unified platform spanning transaction monitoring, name screening, behavioural analysis, and beyond, giving compliance and operations teams the confidence to act faster and with far greater accuracy.

Beyond financial services, DetectX brings the same intelligence to any organisation wrestling with large-scale data matching, risk scoring, or decision intelligence at volume.

If a top-tier VC is reading this, what would you want them to understand about your company in 30 seconds?

Prospero Systems is a company to watch. We are cash positive with a clear runway, focused on accelerated growth across Europe, the UK, and the USA, and we are not coming to the market with our hat in hand.

The global financial crime compliance market represents hundreds of billions in operational cost annually, and the technology underpinning most of it is outdated, fragmented, and haemorrhaging false positives. Regulators are raising the bar. Institutions are under pressure to do more with less. The market is ready for a step change.

DetectX is the platform that delivers it. Not a point solution or a rules engine with AI bolted on, but a purpose-built, modular decision intelligence platform with evolutionary learning at its core, proven to reduce false positives by 98% in live deployments. Clients start with one module and expand across the suite, creating a compounding revenue model that deepens with every client relationship.

We are not actively seeking investment right now, but we have an open mind about strategic financing to support regional acquisitions as we accelerate into new territories. If you are a partner who understands compliance technology and thinks in decades rather than quarters, we would love to talk.

Why has nobody else done what you’re doing?

Most compliance technology on the market is built on rigid, rules-based engines that were designed for a simpler regulatory environment. They flag everything and learn nothing, leaving compliance teams buried in false positives and manual reviews. Newer entrants often bolt AI onto legacy architecture as an afterthought, rather than building intelligence into the platform from the ground up.

DetectX was architected differently. Evolutionary Learning sits at the core of the platform, meaning it does not just apply static rules, it continuously adapts to new patterns, emerging typologies, and client-specific risk profiles. Combined with optimised search, Natural Language Processing, and high-precision scoring, DetectX delivers a level of accuracy and adaptability that traditional vendors simply cannot match.

Equally important is how DetectX is deployed. Clients can adopt a single module, whether that is transaction monitoring, name screening, or client risk profiling, and expand over time, or they can deploy the full 360-degree suite from day one. This modular architecture means institutions are never forced into a rip-and-replace decision. DetectX integrates with existing infrastructure and grows with the organisation.

The outcome is fewer false positives, faster investigations, and compliance operations that scale without a proportional increase in headcount or cost.

How did you meet, and why have you partnered with each other on this business?

We were introduced through a mutual friend, and it quickly became clear that our backgrounds were highly complementary. One of us had deep ideas and vision for what a truly intelligent compliance platform could look like, while the other brought hands-on experience building and scaling software businesses internationally. Between us we had the product thinking and the commercial execution capability that a business like this demands. It felt like a natural partnership from the start.

What was the “this has to exist” moment that made you start the company?

The founding insight behind DetectX was deceptively simple: patterns exist everywhere in nature, and where there are patterns, there is the power to predict. That realisation drove Prospero Systems towards a predictive analytics approach from the very beginning, building models that do not just react to known threats, but learn to detect the patterns that precede them.

How do you make money? Which part of your business model are you most excited about scaling?

Prospero Systems generates revenue through software licensing, with DetectX deployed as a cloud-based SaaS solution or on-premise depending on client requirements. Engagements typically begin with a single module, such as risk scoring, name screening or transaction monitoring, and expand naturally as clients consolidate more of their compliance stack onto the platform. This modular adoption model means revenue grows with the client relationship, without the cost of a new sales cycle.

Two forces are accelerating this opportunity significantly. Regulatory pressure is intensifying globally and institutions face higher standards, faster reporting timelines, and greater accountability for financial crime failures. Many are concluding that fragmented, rules-based point solutions can no longer keep pace, and are actively seeking a more intelligent, unified alternative.

At the same time, adverse media search is rapidly becoming a core compliance requirement rather than an optional enhancement. DetectX uses Natural Language Processing to scan and interpret unstructured media sources at scale, surfacing reputational risk and emerging red flags that traditional screening tools miss entirely, moving due diligence from reactive box-ticking to genuinely intelligence-led risk management.

Which proof points matter most right now?

On the client side, the numbers speak for themselves. One of our financial institution clients achieved a 98% reduction in false positives after deploying DetectX, a result that directly translates into fewer wasted investigator hours, lower operational costs, and a compliance operation that can finally focus on genuine risk rather than chasing noise.

On the recognition side, DetectX has received Fintech Breakthrough Awards with our partner core banking platform Finnova in 2021 and 2022, validating both the technology and the real-world impact it delivers for clients.

We are also seeing strong momentum in terms of platform expansion; clients who initially deploy a single module consistently move towards broader adoption of the DetectX suite as they experience the results firsthand.

How does your product/service make the world a better place?

Financial crime is not victimless. Money laundering funds trafficking, terrorism, and organised crime. Fraud devastates individuals and families. Sanctions evasion allows dangerous actors to operate unchallenged.

The institutions responsible for stopping this are often overwhelmed, buried in false positives and working with tools that were never built for the scale and sophistication of modern financial crime. DetectX exists to change that. We give compliance teams the intelligence they need to find real risk faster, so that the financial system becomes genuinely harder to abuse.

What’s been your biggest unexpected challenge so far, and what did it force you to learn quickly?

Early on, we entered a partnership with a technology provider to support a large enterprise client. What we did not anticipate was how difficult it would be for that partner to build the necessary skills and capacity to deliver at the level the client required. It put the relationship under significant strain and taught us a hard but valuable lesson.

We realised that no matter how good the technology is, implementation and services capability is equally critical to client success, especially at enterprise scale. As a result, we have invested heavily in building a stronger services function within our own channel, ensuring that when global partners take the lead on large deployments, the skills, integration expertise, and client management capability are there to match. We are now significantly better prepared for the complexity that comes with larger enterprise accounts.

What does success look like in 12 months? What about in 5 years?

In 12 months, success looks like establishing a strong client footprint in the UK and USA across banking, insurance, and wealth management, building on the proven success we have already achieved in Switzerland and Austria. We want DetectX to be the platform that forward-thinking compliance leaders in these markets turn to when they are ready to move beyond legacy systems.

In 5 years, success looks like Prospero Systems being recognised as the leading compliance intelligence platform across Europe and North America, with DetectX deeply embedded in the risk and compliance operations of Tier 1 financial institutions. Maintaining our 95% client retention rate as we scale is as important to us as winning new logos, because it is the clearest signal that DetectX is genuinely delivering for the institutions that trust it.

What type of partner or collaborator would most accelerate your journey right now?

The partners that would accelerate our journey most are consultancies and remediation firms already embedded in the compliance and risk decisions of financial institutions. These are the organisations helping banks and payment providers respond to regulatory findings, overhaul their financial crime frameworks, and select the right technology to underpin that change. A partnership with the right consultancy does not just open doors, it places DetectX® exactly where the need is most acute and the appetite for a better solution is highest.

Finish this sentence: “We’ll know we’ve really made it when…”

…DetectX is the platform that compliance leaders at financial institutions around the world point to when asked how they beat financial crime. Not just because it made their operations faster or cheaper, but because it genuinely changed what they were able to detect, prevent, and prove to their regulators. When the question is no longer "can your systems keep up?" but "how did you build something this good?"

Website: www.prospero.systems/

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