How Ria Money Transfer scaled graph technology to power transaction monitoring

Companies that need to stay compliant by managing anti-money laundering and fraud risk rely on accuracy and speed at every stage of the detection and investigation process. But today, it  takes more than that to stay ahead. Criminals and bad actors constantly adapt and innovate, often outpacing traditional investigative tools and making it harder to detect suspicious behavior early. 

For Ria Money Transfer, a global leader in the cross-border money transfer industry, adopting graph technology marked the beginning of a deeper transformation. It has since redefined not only how their compliance teams operate, but how they approach investigations strategically. 

During Linkurious Days London, Alejandro Rivas Vega, Consumer FIU Analyst at Ria, shared how Linkurious Enterprise has evolved from a regional solution to a global one, enabling smarter, faster, and more intuitive investigations across the company’s operations. 

As with many companies, Ria’s investigation teams historically relied on Excel—an approach that made it difficult to detect hidden patterns and networks efficiently. With the rise of new digital solutions, Ria jumped at the opportunity to strengthen its detection capabilities.

The team adopted leading graph technologies, combining Linkurious Enterprise with Neo4j graph database, to support the detection of unusual behaviors and connections. Initially, only their European division was using this new technology. Today, dozens of analysts across Europe and APAC use Linkurious Enterprise for complex investigations.

Alejandro Rivas Vega, Consumer FIU Analyst, emphasized how visualizing connections brought transformative value to their work:

“For us, the decision to adopt graph visualization was logical,” he explains. “We were analyzing complex networks using numbers, tables, spreadsheets—it wasn’t intuitive. Once we moved to graphs, everything changed. An image is very powerful when you
need to explain suspicious activity.”

The ability to clearly visualize entities and their relationships—such as senders, receivers, transactions, and locations—turns complex data into something that’s easier to navigate.

It also helps teams explain their findings more clearly across departments and to regulators.

“Providing an image of a graph to our compliance officers really helps them decide on what actions to take,” Alejandro adds. “It’s a way to translate something very complicated into something everyone can understand.”

A graph-native decision intelligence tool like Linkurious Enterprise offers a critical advantage in a context where organizations are juggling massive quantities of disparate data alongside
evolving threats: These tools make it faster and easier to analyze and explore complex networks of interactions, surfacing anomalies that traditional detection systems often fail to uncover.

One of the key benefits for Ria’s team is the time saved in the early stages of investigations.

“We use Linkurious in our first stage—the detection of the activity,” Alejandro says. “Before, it could take two or three days to gather and interpret the data. Now, we can do that in around three hours.”

This significant time reduction enables investigators to act faster and stay ahead of bad actors who might otherwise pose a risk to the company or its customers.

“Time saving is one of the best things that adds value to what we do,” he adds. “It helps us stay one step ahead of any unwanted activity.”

Graph technology isn’t just accelerating investigations—it’s changing the way analysts think.

“It’s a user-friendly tool,” Alejandro says. “Once you know how to use it, the real work becomes how you think. You start seeing patterns differently. You start making connections faster.”

Years of experience with Linkurious Enterprise have shifted how Ria’s teams approach investigations. Analysts now instinctively look for hidden links, contextual anomalies, and meaningful patterns across connected data.

“We’ve gotten better at how we think and how we approach these connections. They’re now very easy to detect” Alejandro says.

By leveraging decision intelligence platforms like Linkurious Enterprise—built with advanced graph capabilities—organizations gain powerful tools to navigate complex networks with confidence.

That the use of Linkurious has expanded from Ria’s European team to their global team is a testament to its value for investigators. It has helped them deliver not only faster threat detection but also make better decisions earlier in the process. “Once you start with graphs, with this type of technology, you keep going. I don’t believe that we’re going to leave this track,” concludes Alejandro.

Watch the full interview.