Roderick Rodenburg

In the run-up to the Leaders in Finance AML event on 1 October in Amsterdam Pakhuis de Zwijger, we spoke with Roderick Rodenburg, CEO and co-founder of Roseman Labs. We discussed the impact of new European AML legislation, the growing importance of data collaboration, AI in financial crime detection, and why interoperability across Europe should be a priority.

Could you briefly introduce yourself and tell us about Roseman Labs?
Within the company I take the commercial side: business development, and the legal side of data sharing and collaboration. My co-founders bring the deep technical expertise and the domain knowledge, so we complement each other well. We started working on the idea in 2019 as an academic initiative and founded the company in 2020, after signing our first client.”

What are the main priorities for Roseman Labs at the moment?
Our priorities follow from that: continuing to develop the product, and expanding the commercial side of the company so that more institutions can join those networks.

Looking at the broader AML ecosystem, what do you see as the most important developments?
For both the industry and for us, the new European regulations, in particular Article 75 of the AML Regulation (AMLR) and Article 83 of the Payment Services Regulation (PSR), will have a huge impact on fraud detection and anti-money laundering from a data-sharing perspective. They create many of the opportunities that will emerge this year and next. Another major development is, of course, AI. Everyone is working on smarter models, but those models are fuelled by data. That is where these two developments intersect. We already see the potential through the initiatives we’re involved in across different countries. The possibilities of data collaboration are enormous, and we expect to see significant gains in both the efficiency and the effectiveness of anti-financial crime efforts.

One of the central themes of the AML event is balancing effective AML with cost efficiency. Many financial institutions want to become more effective without continuously adding more people and resources. Where do you see the biggest opportunities?
The biggest opportunity is in triage, for both fraud and money laundering detection, and in doing faster and more effective. Every alert you can resolve early is work that never reaches the teams downstream, so the capacity comes from the work you avoid rather than from hiring. What limits triage today is the data you do it on: your own data rarely tells the whole story.
I often compare it to those children’s puzzles where you connect the dots and suddenly see an elephant. What if, in your own data, you only see two of the fifteen dots? With the new possibilities that are emerging, you can suddenly see the rest of the network, the other dots that make up the elephant. It becomes much easier to connect those dots and recognise what you’re looking at.
That creates efficiency in two ways. First, it becomes much easier to weed out false positives because you can see they’re disconnected from the network, so you don’t need to spend time on them. Second, you can much more clearly identify where the elephants are and focus your attention there. That’s where you should be spending your time: taking the threat away.

Fighting financial crime requires cooperation between many different parties. How do you see private-private and private-public collaboration developing over the coming years?
I strongly believe in both, but I think it starts with private-private collaboration. We’re also active in the national security domain and work closely with law enforcement organisations. Every successful data collaboration starts with a trusted, relatively small network. Even if the technology guarantees that no sensitive information is unnecessarily exposed, trust between the participants remains essential.
Once that collaboration proves effective, you can gradually expand it and involve more organisations. We’re already seeing that banks and other financial institutions become much more effective and efficient when they collaborate. The next step is strengthening collaboration with law enforcement so we can become even more effective at stopping criminals. First you stop the damage, and then you look back.

Technology clearly creates opportunities, but also brings risks. What do you see as the main challenge?
The biggest risk is that people simply trust the outcome of a computer without understanding where that outcome comes from.
If we go back to the elephant example, you only see two dots, while the computer tells you it’s an elephant. That isn’t enough. We need systems where users can also see the elephant themselves and understand why they should take action, instead of simply being told what the outcome is.
Especially with AI, outcomes always need to be verifiable. We should build systems that remain human-centric, where people understand and can validate the conclusions instead of blindly following them.

Looking ahead to the Leaders in Finance AML event on 1 October, what are you particularly interested in discussing?
Europe is changing rapidly because of the new legislation, and many organisations are already anticipating what’s coming. What I’m particularly interested in is how we create an open, cross-European network where everybody can work with everybody else, instead of creating separate islands where Dutch banks only work with Dutch banks and German banks only work with German banks. How do we create interoperability? What mechanisms are needed? And how do we make sure that this openness becomes reality? Organised crime crosses borders, so our ambition should too.
Secondly, the Netherlands has traditionally been at the forefront of new developments. When it comes to AML collaboration, however, we’ve become a bit more reluctant. I’d like to discuss what is needed to create that can-do mentality again, and what is needed to get banks collaborating again.

Is there anything we haven’t discussed that deserves more attention?
One question I keep asking myself is whether there are blind spots in our fight against money laundering. We’re often focused on the things we already know, but what are we overlooking?
The great thing about this event is that it brings together banks, regulators, law enforcement and many other stakeholders. That’s exactly the kind of audience where we should ask ourselves whether there’s something we’re collectively missing. It’s much easier to identify blind spots when you bring together such a broad range of perspectives.

Roderick Rodenburg is CEO and co-founder of Roseman Labs. He will be speaking at the Leaders in Finance AML event on 1 October 2026 in Amsterdam, Pakkhuis de Zwijger.