About Us

Anthony Cosgrove MBE and Dr Sebastian Drave met inside HSBC at a moment of reckoning. The bank had just been fined USD1.9bn for failing around anti-money laundering (AML), and their mandate was clear. They had to reinvent how a global institution identified money laundering.

Anthony was at the centre of that reinvention, responsible for delivering the technology within the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), a specialist department created to tackle the most complex and high-risk financial crime. At the same time, Seb became HSBC’s Chief Data Scientist for Financial Crime, building the data science function from scratch and proving that modern analytics could uncover patterns investigators couldn’t see through rules alone.

In 2016, they delivered the Financial Intelligence Platform - a vast data lake containing billions of financial transactions. It was the kind of infrastructure that’s only funded in an existential crisis. Anthony ensured it could operate reliably and securely at enterprise scale. Seb used it to pioneer data-science techniques for detecting complex criminal networks, mapping typologies across vast networks of legitimate activity and exposing hidden money laundering activity. Over the years, they saw the same challenge again and again: criminals networks evolve rapidly, and the biggest challenge in keeping up was the lack of an objective feedback loop on the performance of different technologies, techniques, models and rules.

After many productive years working together, Anthony left HSBC and co-founded Harbr Data, a private data marketplace platform designed to help organisations securely share and collaborate on data. Seb later joined him, and together they began working closely with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. For the FCA’s Financial Crime TechSprint in 2019, they provided synthetic transaction data with hidden criminal networks so the teams could experiment, build, and test without touching sensitive real-world customer data.

Following the event, innovative startups approached them asking to use the data to test and demonstrate their own anti-money laundering technologies. What had started as a thoughtful contribution to the fight against financial crime was morphing into an asset that could become a foundation for asignificant shift in how the industry develops and validates financial crime systems.

Seb led the engineering efforts rebuilding the prototype into a full-blown commercial product capable of serving a broad range of real-world use cases. Using agent-based modelling, proprietary real-world statistics, and deep financial crime expertise, he created something unique - a vast virtual world with millions of entities executing billions of finanical transactions, and hidden criminal networks laundering money using sophisticated methodologies. The results weren’t just convincing, they were deeply useful. Teams could finally test systems end-to-end, measure performance objectively, compare vendors fairly, and train both models and people on data that’s just behaved like the real thing, but without any of the risks.

The product quickly caught the attention of some of the world’s largest and most innovative organisations including global technology providers, ‘Big Four’ consultancies, and Tier-1 banks. What had started as a dataset for testing and demos, had expanded into a platform for model development, system validation, vendor benchmarking, and investigator training. In 2024, they founded Syntheticr AI to build on the early success, and help organisations navigate the next wave of technological change in the AI era.

Today, Syntheticr AI helps organisations to safely and efficiently optimise their AML capabilities by providing high-fidelity synthetic transaction data coupled with scoring-as-a-service. Syntheticr AI helps teams test, train, and benchmark their systems, make better investment decisions, and stay ahead of the curve, as the threat from financial crime continues to evolve.