OUR PARTNERS

Kharon

Discover our series: “Navigating success through strategic partnerships"

At Neterium, we take pride in our strategic partnerships with top-notch platforms and solution partners to deliver unparalleled screening solutions.

Neterium is proud to partner with leading market data providers to deliver best-in-class screening solutions to our clients. By hosting, updating, and managing watchlists on behalf of our joint clients, we remove the operational burden of list management, enabling teams to focus on what matters most: informed decision-making and effective risk mitigation.

Today, we are honoured to spotlight our valued data partner, Kharon, a global organisation behind one of the world’s premier risk analytics engines. Kharon provides the critical insights institutions need to gain a comprehensive view of illicit finance and broader commercial risks, empowering organisations to navigate complex regulatory and geopolitical landscapes with confidence.

Join us as we engage in an in-depth conversation with Paul Gerbino, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Kharon, to explore the dynamics of the Neterium and Kharon partnership.

1) Can you please introduce yourself, Paul?

I am the Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Kharon, where I oversee our global partnerships team. My primary focus is the growth and leadership of our partner ecosystem: the Kharon Activation Network. My role is centered on a core belief we hold at Kharon: in global security and compliance, intelligence only matters if it can be operationalized effectively. My team and I work to ensure that Kharon’s deep, specialized insights are not just available in a vacuum, but are "activated" within the systems and workflows that institutions rely on every day. To achieve this, we partner with world-class organizations and technology leaders, like Neterium, across a diverse range of disciplines, regions, and industries, from global financial institutions and automotive manufacturers to research universities and government agencies. By building this extensive ecosystem, we ensure our risk intelligence is widely accessible and, most importantly, actionable at the exact point of decision.

2) Kharon has evolved significantly over the years, from its origins in developing an investigation and data fusion platform to becoming a recognised data vendor in financial crime compliance. Can you walk us through that journey and what sets Kharon apart in this market?

Kharon was established in 2016 by former senior officials from the U.S. Department of the Treasury who identified a critical gap in the market. They saw firsthand that compliance teams were struggling with "information chaos", trying to navigate a landscape of static, disconnected data that simply couldn't keep pace with the complexity of modern threats or provide a clear picture of risk. What sets us apart is our network-based approach. Where traditional GRC data providers repackage government-listed information, and data aggregators attempt to map connections using algorithms without the subject matter expertise to know what they actually mean, we treat risk as a connectivity problem, mapping the ownership structures, affiliations, and commercial relationships that link sanctioned and restricted entities to the broader economy. We combine AI and advanced data science with multilingual research experts who speak over 30 languages to verify everything against primary sources. This allows our platform to uncover hidden ownership structures, control interests, and other material relationships that static lists or unsophisticated automated systems alone would miss. We aren't just providing data; we are identifying unseen risk and providing a defensible, primary-source-verified narrative that allows our clients to make confident, strategic decisions. Today, we believe that vision has enabled us to set the global standard for risk intelligence. Our insights are now trusted by a diverse ecosystem of some of the world's leading organizations, including 7 of the 10 largest U.S. banks, 6 of the top 10 in the EU, and 4 of the 5 largest global accounting and software firms. Our reach extends across industries to more than 35 Fortune 100 companies, which rely on us to navigate an increasingly complex regulatory and geopolitical landscape.

3) From Kharon’s point of view, what gaps in sanctions screening and KYC programs do large financial institutions still struggle with, and how does the partnership with Neterium address these gaps in a way that neither company could achieve alone?

The primary challenge today is hidden exposure. While institutions are excellent at catching entities directly named on a sanctions list, they frequently struggle with complex ownership structures, as well as other sophisticated evasion and obfuscation methods used by illicit actors. Usually, a firm has to choose between maintaining operational speed or achieving deep intelligence. Our partnership with Neterium eliminates that trade-off by making two of our most critical datasets, Sanctions Ownership and Control, directly available within the Neterium platform. Financial institutions use these datasets to surface risks that traditional "flat" watchlists simply cannot see. Our Sanctioned Network data allows users to identify restricted issuers and their subsidiaries that aren't explicitly named on government lists but are legally restricted by extension. Our Control dataset uncovers "gray zone" risks, entities that may have a clean ownership structure on paper but are effectively operated by sanctioned individuals through board seats, family ties, or front companies. The depth of this intelligence is generated within the Kharon Core -- the world's only comprehensive, structured, and verified resource on the commercial activity of global risk actors. Our GraphCast solution then serves as the high-fidelity, machine-readable delivery mechanism, carrying this expert-verified research directly into Neterium’s engine. To make this real for a Neterium user, consider a transaction involving a counterparty in a major global trade hub. On a standard watchlist, this company appears "clean." However, by leveraging Kharon insights, the Neterium engine can instantly identify if that entity is effectively operated by a sanctioned senior executive, even if they have no formal ownership stake. Without this partnership, that risk is invisible. This integration allows a bank to move from reactive guesswork to automated, perpetual KYC (pKYC), giving the screening engine the "map" it needs to navigate these hierarchies at the speed of a transaction.

4) Looking ahead now: AI is reshaping FCC quickly, sometimes faster than financial institutions can adapt. Where does Kharon see the most meaningful opportunities (and risks), and how is Kharon enhancing its risk intelligence solutions with AI to stay ahead of the curve?

The primary opportunity for AI in compliance lies in the ability to conduct faster analysis across vast global data sources. At Kharon, we have expanded our use of AI technologies to support the research processes that power our proprietary third-party risk intelligence. These tools assist our analysts in identifying and organizing relevant information from global public sources, accelerating the discovery of ownership records, regulatory disclosures, and corporate filings. We utilize an internal AI-enabled workflow tool that leverages large language models to process these massive volumes of information, significantly improving efficiency and consistency while operating within established compliance controls. However, our approach is defined by responsible AI governance, supported by a human-in-the-loop model. This approach ensures that automation improves speed and scale while maintaining the accuracy, reliability, and regulatory defensibility required for high-stakes risk management. Crucially, Kharon's expert-verified intelligence enables AI systems to ground their analysis in a defensible source of truth from the start, which we believe will become an increasingly important issue as compliance teams embrace AI systems in their workflows. As AI becomes more prevalent, the question will no longer be whether an institution uses it, but whether it can explain how AI-supported decisions were reached. Programs that cannot demonstrate human oversight and transparent methodology will face scrutiny. Simultaneously, we see threat actors adopting AI to accelerate evasion, rapidly generating fabricated corporate documentation and complex structuring schemes. The institutions best positioned for the future are those moving away from point-in-time assessments and simple list matching. By deploying AI thoughtfully to uncover risk hidden in complex entity networks, connecting high-risk actors to indirect relationships like ownership, control, and intermediaries, institutions can maintain a continuously updated map of global risk that evolves as fast as the threat landscape itself.