Trusted by leading stockbrokers, wealth managers and NBFIs, Dossiers is now entering the banking sector with a real-time transaction monitoring service built for modern fraud
South Asia’s financial sector is facing one of the most challenging fraud environments in its history. Recent events in the banking sector in Sri Lanka, combined with a surge in AI-enabled scams and identity fraud across South Asia, have made one thing clear: legacy compliance processes are no longer enough. Fraudsters are faster, more sophisticated, and increasingly operating from inside institutions that still rely on periodic reviews and manual checks.
The Central Bank’s National Risk Assessment 2024/25 explicitly flagged customer verification infrastructure and transaction monitoring as residual vulnerabilities in Sri Lanka’s banking sector, rating money laundering and fraud risk at medium-high. With the country also preparing for its 2026 FATF/APG mutual evaluation, which requires demonstrable effectiveness rather than policies on paper, financial institutions are under increasing pressure to rethink how they detect and prevent financial crime.
Dossiers, a Sri Lankan compliance technology company, is helping financial institutions close these gaps with a purpose-built platform that combines customer onboarding, KYC, continuous PEP and sanctions screening, and real-time transaction monitoring, all backed by a proprietary database tailored to the South Asian context.
“The most damaging fraud we are seeing today happens at the transaction layer, where dormant accounts suddenly activating to move large sums, credentials being reset moments before a major withdrawal, unauthorised transfers slips past teams that can only review a fraction of daily activity. No human compliance team can monitor every transaction in real-time. That is exactly the gap we built Dossiers to close,” said Nisal Periyapperuma, Founder & CEO of Dossiers.
How Dossiers addresses modern financial fraud
The platform is built around four integrated capabilities designed to prevent fraud before money moves, rather than report on it after the fact:
• Customer Onboarding & KYC — Verifies identities in under five minutes using AI-powered document checks, biometric liveness detection and device-level intelligence, without compromising compliance rigour.
• Continuous PEP & Sanctions Screening — Monitors customers in real time, ensuring institutions are immediately alerted to any change in risk status rather than relying on periodic checks.
• High-Risk Customer & Beneficial Ownership Flagging — Cross-referencing across the full customer base to catch patterns single-entity checks miss, such as shell company networks and circular ownership structures.
• Real-Time Transaction Monitoring — AI agents monitor every transaction across an institution, 24/7. Suspicious activity, such as a dormant account suddenly withdrawing 90% of its balance or a credential reset followed by a large transfer, triggers instant triage and can halt the transaction through biometric verification at the point of authorisation.
Dossiers is built on a proprietary database of over 10 million documents sourced from newspaper archives, government records and company registrations across South Asia, and has already screened more than 500,000 customers of Sri Lankan financial institutions. Unlike Western providers, it is designed for local realities, including common names such as Perera and Mohammad that often generate high volumes of false positives, while replacing batch processing with automated, real-time screening. The founding team’s background in building WatchDog, a leading Sri Lankan citizen journalism platform, brings deep expertise in open-source intelligence and data verification directly into the product.
Dossiers has so far focused on the non-banking financial sector, serving institutions including Sampath Securities, Asha Securities, Asia Securities, NDB Wealth Management, NDB Securities and Mercantile Finance. Capital Alliance (CAL) — a leading stock brokerage, unit trust provider and wealth manager — and a major regional BNPL player are currently onboarding onto the platform.
Building on this foundation, Dossiers is now expanding into the banking sector, with its real-time transaction monitoring capability at the forefront of this growth. As fraud risks continue to evolve across the region, banks, NBFIs and financial institutions are encouraged to engage with Dossiers to strengthen their fraud prevention frameworks.
