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AI counterparty checks and AML duties: where they differ
Short answer
AI can collect a counterparty's data from agreed sources and prepare a card for review, and checking the data does not by itself fulfil AML duties. Those apply to obliged entities, and a person makes the risk assessment and the decision. At Syntalith the automation costs from €3,000 net, and with 300 counterparty checks a month at 15 minutes each it pays back in 1.8 months.
How we workDetails ↓
- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- analysis with an engineer and a free prototype
- €0
- team in ChatGPT or Claude, up to 10 people
- from €1,150
- automation, agent or application for one process
- from €3,000
We belong to the OpenAI and Anthropic partner programmes and learn through their official courses. What this means ↓
Author: Syntalith · 3 min read
Statistics
Counterparty checks: statistics 2026
1.8 mo.
payback of a €3,000 automation at 300 counterparty checks a month: €2,618 of work today, €930 with checking and the model. Scenario.
90%
According to the European Commission (2026), 90% of companies using AI say that people take the decisions, and 2% of decisions are fully automated.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 578 (2026) ↗
52.5%
According to Eurostat (2025), 52.5% of EU companies that considered AI and did not use it named unclear legal consequences as a reason.
Source: Eurostat, use of artificial intelligence in enterprises (2025) ↗
20.0%
According to Eurostat (2025), 20.0% of EU companies with at least 10 employees used AI.
Source: Eurostat, 20% of EU enterprises use AI technologies (2025) ↗
14–56%
According to Anthropic (2025), studies with a control group found smaller time savings, from 14% to 56%.
Source: Anthropic, Estimating AI productivity gains (2025) ↗
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
Two different orders under the name „company check”
The purchasing team needs a correct identifier for the counterparty and a documented check of its data in an agreed source. An obliged entity needs more: Poland's Ministry of Finance links AML duties to the list of obliged entities, to identifying and assessing risk, and to customer due diligence measures. These are two different orders, and automating data collection does not turn the first into the second.
The model searches for a company by name and finds an entity with a similar-sounding name. It returns „company active”, although the result concerns another company. A second case: the source is unavailable, and a report with no warnings looks like the result of a check. No result does not mean a positive check: the system records the query error and shows what was not established.
| Element of the result | The acceptance question |
|---|---|
| Identity of the entity | were the agreed identifiers used, beyond a similar name |
| Origin of the information | can you go back to the source and the time of the check |
| Gap or contradiction | is it visible what was not established and why |
| Draft summary | does every statement have a basis |
| The employee's decision | is it kept apart from the data the system fetched |
- Similar company names and different countries of registration
- Data changed after the last check
- An unavailable source and a query error
- The expected finding written down before the test
What automated counterparty checks cost and when they pay back
- Today
- 300 counterparty checks × 15 min = 75 h (€2,618)
- With the system, a person checks the output in 35% of the time
- €916
- Model, 3 calls per case, Claude Sonnet 5.5
- €14
- Cost of one case
- €8.73 today, €3.10 with the system
- Saving
- €1,688 a month
Payback of €3,000
1.8 months
The volume, the time and the checking share are the scenario's assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat. Model: 6,000 input tokens and 600 output tokens per call at Anthropic's rates, converted at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
The count covers the work around each case: searching, reading, writing and handing over. What remains is the time to check the result, 35% of today's work in the scenario. Before the quote we measure both times on 20 to 100 cases the team has already handled, in a free test that takes 5 working days.
Where the automation supplier's scope ends
The person responsible for AML, with a lawyer, sets how the rules apply, which information is required and when decisions are made. The technical supplier prepares the data collection, the card and the review workflow. If the procedure does not describe what to do with conflicting data, it needs to be made precise first: the automation will show the contradiction and will not settle it. Access to registers, terms of use and the retention period for results are checked in the specific project.
A few new counterparties a month
a manual check in the registers
no build
Checking data in purchasing
a counterparty card with data from the sources
an automation
An obliged entity with hundreds of clients
data collection for the AML procedure with a person's decision
from €3,000
Where to start
The first test covers a data card for one clearly defined action, with sources the company names and a person who accepts the result. We build this kind of system as part of our AI automations. For the free process review, a description of one case from the last few weeks and the tools it went through is enough. You do not need to send confidential documents, and you receive a written plan within 2 working days.
Worked example · Scenario
How we count the payback: counterparty checks
We run the same count for your process in the free process review.
€1,047
a month for checking 60 counterparties by hand
Payback: 3.4 mo.
30 minutes to check a counterparty and checking in 15% of the old time are our assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. We measured the model cost of the simpler profile, €0.009, in our counterparty profile system, converted at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026. Avoided losses are a scenario: we assume that 1 in 800 counterparties checked is a company that would not have paid, and that the check protects €6,900 on average. In the review we calculate it on your receivables.
See the full calculation →
