Technology
Section 2® Launches as First AML Company to Target Bad Actors and Their Criminal Networks
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2 months agoon
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Financial Crime Intelligence Company Debuts Hybrid Threat Central™ Platform
SIOUX FALLS, S.D., Aug. 5, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Section 2, Inc., today announced its launch as an AML and financial crime intelligence company along with Hybrid Threat Central™ (HTC), a platform built to identify the criminal networks behind financial crime rather than the individual transactions they generate.
An important aspect of Section 2’s approach is a focus on false negatives — the criminal actors and transactions that slip through undetected, in contrast to the false positives that dominate industry conversation. A single missed detection can cost an institution millions of dollars once regulatory penalties and remediation are factored in, with remediation costs alone running roughly 12 times the amount of the original fine.
Despite massive AML spending, confiscation and recovery rates remain below 1% globally. The reason is the overwhelming number of alerts, and manual teams’ inability to stay ahead of the volume. A modern transaction monitoring system at a regional institution generates alerts at a rate that outpaces analyst capacity by approximately 50:1.
To solve the problem, Section 2 is introducing Hybrid Threat Central™ (HTC), a platform built to identify the criminal networks behind financial crime rather than the individual transactions they generate. It is built on Hybrid Threat Finance™ (HTF™), a patent-pending methodology developed by founder and CEO Debra Geister over more than a decade of work in AML and fraud detection.
“Every AML officer knows the number, even if they’ve learned not to say it out loud: somewhere around 1% of illicit financial flows get caught by the global anti-money-laundering apparatus,” Geister said. “Banks spend billions of dollars a year on transaction monitoring, and the detection rate hasn’t meaningfully moved in 20 years. The problem isn’t effort. It’s that the industry has been monitoring transactions when it should be identifying actors.”
From transactions to actors
Traditional transaction monitoring systems generate alert volumes that outpace analyst capacity, according to Section 2, producing false-positive rates estimated at 85% to 95% while an estimated 98% of financial crime goes undetected. The firm estimates the financial industry spends more than $200 billion annually on compliance, investing largely in manual reviews that cannot keep up with the massive number of alerts.
Section 2 said the core flaw is a unit-of-analysis problem: transactions are cheap for criminal networks to generate and abandon, while the underlying business model and network entity behind them are far more durable and far harder for criminals to change. The company uncovers the bad actors and their networks.
HTF addresses that by extending the traditional three-stage AML model — placement, layering and integration — to five stages, adding revenue generation, where criminal proceeds originate, and operational sustainment, where threat actors reinvest to fund ongoing activity.
The platform
Hybrid Threat Central™ is powered by three components, according to the company:
TENet™ (Threat Entity Network), a continuously updated library of financial crime targeting packages built on the HTF™ methodology and covering all five stages of the financial crime lifecycle, delivered via API or SFTP into a bank’s existing transaction monitoring system.TRACC™ (Threat Risk Assessment Command Center), which overlays threat intelligence with an institution’s own risk profile to identify exposure and prioritize which TENet™ packages to deploy.HTF Assist™, an analyst investigation layer that produces investigation-ready case candidates structured for suspicious activity report (SAR) filing.
The platform is built on Google Cloud infrastructure, with Vertex AI powering its machine learning layer. Section 2 designed HTC to be an intelligence layer, not a replacement system — it works alongside an institution’s existing transaction monitoring infrastructure rather than requiring a rip-and-replace. In one deployment alongside an existing transaction monitoring system, Section 2 found that TENet™ reduced false positives from 94% to 18%.
Addressing national priorities and the effectiveness rule
The Section 2 platform is designed to help institutions respond to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s (FinCEN) eight government-wide AML/CFT priorities: corruption, cybercrime, terrorist financing, fraud, transnational criminal organizations, drug trafficking, human trafficking and smuggling, and proliferation financing.
The company also pointed to the “effectiveness rule,” a standard under the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines and the Department of Justice’s Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs. Under that standard, a written compliance program is not sufficient on its own; institutions must show their programs are actively working, adequately funded and capable of preventing, detecting and correcting violations to receive legal and sentencing credit. Section 2 said actor-level attribution gives institutions a clearer way to demonstrate the outcomes regulators now expect, rather than alert volume alone.
Built on a decade of investigative practice
Section 2’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU), a team of career intelligence, law enforcement and financial services compliance professionals, serves as the human-in-the-loop oversight behind the platform, the company said. The unit keeps Section 2’s threat actor and typology databases current, produces the whitepapers and case studies that back the platform’s findings, and reviews every classification before it reaches a customer, so that outputs remain sourced, defensible and examiner-ready. The SIU also provides specialized investigation support directly to partners on complex cases requiring deep-dive research.
About Section 2
Section 2, Inc. is a financial crime intelligence company founded by Debra Geister, a three-decade veteran of the AML and fraud detection industry. Geister began her career building foundational detection systems at LexisNexis in the years following the USA PATRIOT Act and later oversaw global compliance functions for major financial institutions before founding Section 2. She has worked as a practitioner in all facets of AML — CIP/IDV, KYC, sanctions, and AML operations. The result is the company’s Hybrid Threat Finance™ methodology and Hybrid Threat Central™ platform which are designed to shift financial crime detection from isolated transactions to the criminal networks and business models behind them.
More information is available at section2.com.
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SOURCE Section 2
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Technology
Huawei Upgrades Stellar AI WAN Solution to Drive All Intelligence Across Industries
Published
3 minutes agoon
September 21, 2026By
SHANGHAI, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Huawei unveiled its upgraded Stellar AI WAN Solution. Centered on ultimate computing efficiency and multi-dimensional security, this solution addresses cross-region computing challenges in efficiency, cost, and security, driving all intelligence across industries in the AI era.
Stellar AI WAN for Intelligent Connectivity
Amid the rapid expansion of AI computing power, deploying new compute infrastructure in the West has made remote invocation the new norm. However, traditional networks face three critical issues relating to cross-region computing.
Severe efficiency loss: Invoking computing power across 1,000 km can incur a 37% efficiency loss from a mere 0.073% packet loss.High on-premise costs: Local compute deployment costs from 1 million RMB per branch.Expensive private lines: Enterprises spend around 1.2 million RMB annually on 10G private lines.
To address this, Leon Wang, President of Huawei’s Data Communication Product Line, introduced the Stellar AI WAN Solution, enabling lossless delivery of computing power over 1,000 km for a local-like remote computing experience. The XH computing-network appliance uses a unique layerwise model partitioning algorithm to run the initial and final layers of inference locally while offloading intermediate layers to remote infrastructure. With the network transmitting only high-dimensional vectors, raw data remains on-premises. The appliance requires just two xPUs to match a traditional 8-xPU setup, slashing xPU costs by 75%. The updated Starnet lossless algorithm cuts bandwidth idle time by over 80% and reduces required bandwidth fivefold, further lowering cross-region computing costs.
Stellar AI WAN for Security
As global security threats intensify, novel vectors like APTs and HNDL attacks continue to emerge. To address these, Huawei provides a three-layer defense for WANs.
Device layer: Intrinsic security boards detect and block intrusions in real time, tracing threats within minutes at over 95% accuracy.Link layer: Built-in QKD delivers robust quantum security without extra devices or fibers, slashing costs by over 60%. An adaptive noise suppression algorithm extends QKD transmission past 80 km.Network layer: APN6-based data fencing enables network-wide control over traffic paths, ensuring data travels exclusively within secure networks with intrinsic security and quantum encryption deployed.
Looking ahead, Huawei will continually upgrade the Stellar AI WAN Solution, deepening its computing-network synergy and multi-dimensional security. Together with partners, Huawei aims to reinforce the intelligent network foundation and accelerate all intelligence across enterprises.
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SOURCE Huawei
Technology
FinMet.sg Launches a More Affordable Way to Own Physical Gold in Singapore
Published
3 minutes agoon
September 21, 2026By
Customers can purchase 24 karat 99.99% pure Swiss-made, LBMA accredited gold from one gram, manage their holdings online and request physical delivery or pick-up in Singapore.
SINGAPORE, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — FinMet Pte. Ltd. has announced the launch of FinMet.sg, a fully transactional platform created specifically for customers in Singapore who want a simpler way to purchase, own and manage physical gold. FinMet’s global presence began in Singapore, and FinMet.sg builds on that foundation with a service designed around how customers in Singapore identify themselves, make payments, store their gold and take delivery. Customers can begin with one gram, monitor their holdings through a clear account experience, buy or sell at any time, and request physical pickup/delivery once their holdings reach 10 grams.
The purpose of FinMet.sg is simple: to remove unnecessary friction from purchasing physical gold without changing what the customer ultimately owns. The platform makes it possible to begin with a smaller quantity, complete purchases online and view holdings through a clear account experience. At every stage, the underlying product remains 24 karat, 99.99% pure, Swiss-made physical gold.
To start purchasing and managing physical gold from just one gram, visit FinMet.sg today.
A Seamless, Secure Purchasing Journey
This approach is intended to make physical gold easier to access and manage for customers who value clarity, convenience and the option of delivery. Rather than requiring customers to begin with a larger bar, complete an entirely offline purchase or arrange storage independently, FinMet.sg brings the principal stages of gold ownership into one online platform designed for use in Singapore. Gold purchased through the platform is professionally vaulted in Singapore, and customers can request physical delivery within Singapore once their holdings reach 10 grams.
The customer journey incorporates services that people in Singapore already use and recognise, including Singpass for identity verification and PayNow for payment. This straightforward online process includes:
Accessible Entry: Customers purchase gold in whole-gram quantities, beginning at one gram.Transparent Pricing: Before confirming a transaction, customers review the live price per gram in Singapore dollars and the total amount payable. Clear Ownership: Once a purchase is completed, legal title to the corresponding physical gold passes to the customer, reflected immediately in their platform balance.Flexible Management: Customers can hold, purchase more, sell through the platform, or request physical delivery within Singapore once their holding reaches 10 grams.
How Does FinMet.sg Make Physical Gold More Affordable?
FinMet.sg’s direct-to-consumer model reduces the overheads associated with operating a conventional network of brick-and-mortar stores. These efficiencies are passed on to customers, helping make physical gold more affordable and accessible while retaining professional vaulting and the option of physical delivery or collection.
“We took a customer-first approach to make the buyer’s entry into gold ownership the easiest part of the experience,” says Anirudh Menon, Co-Founder and CEO of FinMet Technologies.
“Price matters, but affordability should not come at the expense of clear ownership,” adds Sunil Kashyap, Managing Director of FinMet Pte. Ltd. “Gold that is identifiable rather than held within an undifferentiated pool gives customers greater clarity over what they own and makes taking physical delivery more straightforward.”
Professional Vaulting and Uncompromised Purity
The physical gold is held in the form of 99.99% pure, Swiss-made CombiBars. These physical bullion bars are individually minted into individual one-gram segments that can be separated without reducing their stated metal weight or purity. This structure supports FinMet.sg’s whole-gram ownership model while retaining a clear connection between the quantity shown on the platform and the underlying physical asset.
The gold is professionally vaulted in Singapore by Helveticor, an international Swiss-based provider of security logistics, storage and transportation services. Helveticor provides the professional vaulting arrangement, while FinMet.sg provides the website through which customers purchase, view and manage their gold.
Designed for Ease of Use
Ease of use was treated as a product requirement rather than a secondary design consideration. The customer journey was developed to present the essential information clearly, from the quantity and price of a purchase to the customer’s current holdings and delivery eligibility.
The team behind FinMet.sg developed the platform with a clear understanding that trust must extend beyond the gold itself to every part of the customer experience. The aim was to create a service that feels straightforward and familiar to people in Singapore, including those purchasing physical gold for the first time.
“This is a platform that I wanted to make sure my mother could use without anyone else’s help,” says Anirudh Menon, Co-Founder and CEO of FinMet Technologies. “That was my benchmark for success in the user experience.”
For customers unfamiliar with physical gold, practical considerations—such as deciding how much to buy, understanding purity, arranging storage, and determining resale options—can make an initial purchase difficult to navigate. FinMet.sg addresses these barriers through a one-gram starting quantity, professional vaulting, and an online management platform.
FinMet Group’s leadership brings decades of experience in the global precious metals market.
“Gold has always been trusted. What has been missing is an experience that matches that trust with the standards people now expect from any financial platform. That is what FinMet.sg is built on,” noted Sunil Kashyap, Managing Director, FinMet Pte. Ltd.
Commitment to Industry Standards
FinMet follows the Seven Retail Gold Investment Principles developed by the World Gold Council, covering areas such as fairness, transparency, protection of customer assets and regulatory compliance. The company clarifies that adherence to the framework does not amount to certification or endorsement by the World Gold Council.
FinMet Pte. Ltd. is also an Associate Corporate Member of the Singapore Bullion Market Association (SBMA), reinforcing the company’s connection to Singapore’s professional bullion-market community.
FinMet Pte. Ltd. is registered under Singapore’s Precious Stones and Precious Metals Act as a regulated dealer. Regulation by Singapore’s Ministry of Law is for anti-money laundering and countering terrorism financing purposes only, and does not constitute product endorsement.
As a precious-metals dealer—not a bank or MAS-licensed financial institution—FinMet does not accept deposits or provide financial advice. Gold prices can fluctuate, and customers should review all applicable terms before completing a transaction.
Further information is available at https://finmet.sg/.
About FinMet Group
FinMet is a precious metals advisory and technology group operating in Singapore, UAE and other international markets. Its activities span precious metals consulting, product development, sector-specific technology solutions and partnerships with industry associations across the global precious metals ecosystem. FinMet Technologies Pvt. Ltd., the Group’s technology arm, was named Best Financial Technology Company in Gold of the Year 2025–26 at the India Gold Conference (IGC) 2026 in Goa.
About FinMet Pte. Ltd.
FinMet Pte. Ltd. is a Singapore-registered precious-metals dealer and the operator of FinMet.sg, a platform through which customers in Singapore can purchase and manage physical gold. The platform offers whole-gram purchases from one gram, online holdings management, buying and selling subject to applicable terms, professional vaulting in Singapore and physical delivery from 10 grams.
UEN: 202022529N Registered address: 160 Robinson Road, #14-04, Singapore Business Federation Center, Singapore 068914 Website:https://finmet.sg/
100-Word Media Summary
FinMet Pte. Ltd. has launched FinMet.sg, a fully transactional platform created for customers in Singapore seeking a simpler way to purchase and manage physical gold. Operated by a Singapore-registered company, it combines FinMet Group’s international precious-metals experience with familiar local services, including Singpass and PayNow. Customers can purchase 99.99% pure, Swiss-made gold from one gram, monitor their holdings, and buy or sell through the platform. The gold is held as physical CombiBars and professionally vaulted in Singapore by Helveticor. Physical delivery within Singapore is available from 10 grams. Ease of use was central to the platform’s development.
Five Key Facts for Journalists
FinMet.sg launched on 2 September 2026 as a Singapore-based platform created specifically for customers in Singapore and operated by Singapore-registered FinMet Pte. Ltd.The website is fully transactional, with purchases beginning from one gram.Customers purchase 24 karat, 99.99% pure, Swiss-made physical gold.Holdings are reflected in physical CombiBars professionally vaulted in Singapore by Helveticor.Customers can monitor, buy or sell through the platform and request physical delivery from 10 grams, subject to applicable terms.
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SOURCE FinMet Pte. Ltd.
Technology
Apurva.ai Evolves Apurva LENS from an Organisational Product to a Platform for the Development Ecosystem
Published
3 minutes agoon
September 21, 2026By
Rohini and Nandan Nilekani-supported Apurva.ai evolves Apurva LENS from a knowledge workspace into a platform for cross-organisational learning and collaboration Apurva LENS is open for practitioners and organisations to explore and experience its capabilities firsthand
BENGALURU, India, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Apurva.ai, an AI-enabled public-good digital infrastructure working with over 50 global organisations, today announced a new platform model for Apurva LENS, extending it from a product that helps individual organisations work with their knowledge to a platform that enables knowledge to travel across the wider development ecosystem. Apurva LENS is already being used and tested by organisations addressing complex social challenges across the Global South and beyond.
Apurva.ai is a unit of C4EC Foundation, co-founded by Nilekani Philanthropies to support change leaders working to respond to complex social challenges with speed, at scale, and sustainably.
As social and development challenges grow in scale and complexity, no single organisation has all the knowledge or answers needed to respond effectively. There is a growing need for ways to bring together what different actors and communities know, make sense of it collectively, and respond at scale.
Apurva LENS, part of a suite of AI-enabled products, was designed to help actors across the development ecosystem, including funders, governments, NGOs and change leaders, make sense of knowledge that often remains siloed across research, evaluations, programme experience and conversations. At its core are the voices and lived experiences of communities, so that those closest to a problem can help shape what happens next. Today, Apurva LENS has helped surface more than half a million voices and perspectives from across the development ecosystem in the Global South.
The new platform model transforms Apurva LENS from an organisation-level product into a platform for cross-organisational learning and collaboration. Multiple actors across an ecosystem can now learn from knowledge made available by each other, while retaining control over what they keep private and what they choose to share. This allows learning generated in one part of an ecosystem to become useful elsewhere, without losing its context or ownership.
The shift reflects a larger premise behind Apurva LENS: as AI makes more knowledge available, the challenge is no longer simply accessing information but making sense of it. By bringing together research, evidence, and organisational learning with the voices and lived experiences of communities from the outset, Apurva LENS enables a more bottom-up approach where those closest to a problem help shape how it is understood and how solutions are designed. This approach is already being explored across different development contexts.
SELCO Foundation initially used Apurva LENS to bring together organisational knowledge spanning archival information, everyday conversations and sector-focused assets, enabling teams to query it, surface patterns and synthesise insights. The collaboration has since extended beyond SELCO Foundation through the Platform for Collective Wisdom (PCW), an initiative enabled by Apurva.ai. PCW brings together community voices, practitioner perspectives and institutional knowledge across the development sector, allowing knowledge that would otherwise remain siloed to be connected and built upon across the wider ecosystem.Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA) used Apurva LENS to organise, analyse and synthesise community dialogues and research across Kenya, Uganda, Sierra Leone and South Africa, spanning climate resilience, health, livelihoods, food systems, gender, governance and financing. The work helped surface themes across countries while reinforcing an important principle: AI-assisted analysis was most useful when combined with human contextual judgment grounded in local realities, political economy and systems dynamics.In Brazil, Museu da Pessoa, one of the world’s earliest virtual museums, has built an archive of 20,000 life stories and approximately 11,000 hours of recorded material, capturing experiences across generations, regions and communities. Using Apurva LENS, the team prototyped a subset of voices to explore experiences around longevity, surfacing patterns and differences across individual life stories. The work points to a larger opportunity: turning a vast archive into living, accessible knowledge, that enables insights rooted in local experience to travel across languages and geographies and inform understanding far beyond where those stories originated.Rare’s Fish Forever works with fishers, local leaders, governments, funders and NGOs across Central and South America, Africa and Asia-Pacific to restore coastal fisheries and enable communities to manage them sustainably. As the programme expanded, knowledge accumulated across reports, presentations, field notes, chats and informal conversations. Fish Forever brought in Apurva LENS to help organise this collective knowledge, enabling teams to connect what they know with what they are learning and how conditions are changing. Its longer-term ambition is a living knowledge ecosystem where new insights from communities can continually inform learning across the programme.
Aggrey Aluso, Executive Director, Resilience Action Network Africa (RANA), said, “Working across countries, communities and interconnected development challenges, we see firsthand how knowledge can remain fragmented across programmes, partners and contexts. Our work with Apurva LENS has shown the value of bringing community voices together with research and systems knowledge to see connections that would otherwise be difficult to surface. The opportunity of a platform approach is to take this further, enabling learning to travel across actors and ecosystems while retaining the local context that gives it meaning. AI can help make those connections, but human judgment remains essential to understanding and acting on them.”
Dr. Harish Hande, CEO, SELCO Foundation, said, “Some of the most valuable learning comes from communities and practitioners solving real problems every day, yet those experiences rarely travel far enough. When they can be connected across organisations and geographies, we can build on what has already been learned rather than repeatedly starting from scratch. Our work with Apurva.ai is about creating that possibility at scale, while ensuring that community knowledge and lived experience remain at the heart of how solutions are shaped.”
Nandan Nilekani, Co-Founder and Chairman, Infosys and Chairman of EkStep Foundation, said, “AI’s real opportunity is to make intelligence useful at scale, across varied societal contexts. India has shown how open infrastructure can enable ecosystems whose impact can extend far beyond its borders. Apurva.ai is bringing that thinking to knowledge – connecting research, organisational learning and community experience so that insights can travel across organisations and geographies. I hope more organisations will join us to explore what we can build together.”
Anand Rajan, Co-Founder and Mission Leader, Apurva.ai, said, “The development sector does not lack knowledge. It already exists across organisations, research, programmes and, importantly, within communities themselves. The challenge is turning all of this into understanding that people can act on. With Apurva LENS becoming a platform, we are moving from helping individual organisations make their knowledge work for them to asking what becomes possible when that knowledge can travel across an ecosystem. AI can help us make sense of this complexity at a scale that was not possible before. But judgment, context and action remain fundamentally human.”
Apurva LENS is open for practitioners and organisations to explore and experience its capabilities firsthand. The experience brings to life a question at the heart of Apurva.ai’s approach: What if communities were not simply the recipients of solutions, but helped shape them from the start?
About Apurva.ai
Apurva.ai is a public-good, sense-making infrastructure for systems change. Through its AI-powered suite of products, it enables change leaders and organisations to unlock the collective wisdom within their networks by connecting community voices and lived experiences with knowledge from across the wider ecosystem. With communities at the centre, Apurva.ai helps surface connections, build shared understanding and enable more contextually relevant action on complex social challenges. Its suite of products supports a continuous cycle of listening, learning and acting, helping ecosystems move from fragmented knowledge towards collective understanding and systemic change. Apurva.ai is a unit of C4EC Foundation.
For more on Apurva.ai visit: https://apurva.ai/about-us/
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