AN Austin, Texas-headquartered company sees significant opportunities in the Philippine digital finance market as the firm seeks to expand its business in Southeast Asia.
According to Troy Nyi Nyi, senior vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific at SEON Technologies Ltd., the rapid growth of digital transactions, alongside increasingly sophisticated fraud threats, in the country is a key growth driver for the company, which operates the eponymous Seon fraud-prevention platform.
Nyi Nyi told the BusinessMirror in an email interview that the company has tapped local IT-solutions provider Exist Software Labs Inc. (ESLI) to help integrate its fraud prevention and anti-money laundering (AML) capabilities into clients’ existing technology environments.
Nyi Nyi said ESLI’s integration expertise allows real-time fraud and AML controls to be embedded into core systems rather than operating alongside them. ESLI, he added, can bring these capabilities into the technology environments that clients already use.
‘Seon [the platform] becomes part of a broader technology stack rather than arriving as a separate deployment project,’ Nyi Nyi explained.
‘Our starting point was whether a partner could put Seon [the platform] into environments that are already complex and already running. [ESLI] met that bar, with more than two decades in software engineering and systems integration and a track record with banking, fintech and payments organisations across the region,’ he added.
Nyi Nyi said company executives believe their partnership with ESLI ‘extends our reach to more organizations as they strengthen their defenses against evolving financial crime.’
The growing role of online platforms in everyday commerce has been underscored by a central bank report that digital payments accounted for 64.7 percent of total retail transaction volume in 2025, up from 57.4 percent in 2024.
‘Organizations across banking, fintech, payments, e-commerce and iGaming are dealing with more sophisticated identity fraud, transaction abuse and financial crime, while needing to keep digital experiences fast and convenient for legitimate customers,’ Nyi Nyi said.
‘That creates a growing need for fraud prevention that operates in real time without adding unnecessary friction,’ he added.
Complementary
ACCORDING to Nyi Nyi, the partnership also brings together what the company describes as ‘complementary capabilities.’
He explained that Seon Technologies provides fraud and financial-crime intelligence covering fraud detection and risk scoring, customer and payment screening, AML transaction monitoring, identity verification, case management and reporting.
ESLI, meanwhile, provides the integration expertise needed to connect these capabilities with the systems that clients already use.
Nyi Nyi said fraudsters rarely operate through a single channel, making it important for organizations to connect signals across identity, devices, behavior and transactions to obtain a more complete picture of risk.
While most organizations already have fraud and compliance tools in place, he said many of these systems were not designed to work together, leaving risk information fragmented across different parts of the business.
‘We do not want clients to feel that fixing that means starting from scratch,’ he said. ‘Seon [the platform[ operates as an AI command center for fraud prevention and AML compliance rather than a point solution bolted onto one stage of the journey.’
Afasa
NYI Nyi also pointed to the Anti-Financial Account Scamming Act (Afasa) as another stimulant for the digital finance market. According to him, the law raised expectations for safeguards to be embedded across the full digital customer journey rather than applied as bolt-on checks after onboarding.
According to Nyi Nyi, risks need to be assessed continuously, beginning even before know-your-customer (KYC) procedures and extending through login, checkout and payouts, with decisions that remain explainable and auditable for regulators and supervisors.
Requirements also vary from one market to another, Nyi Nyi said. Regulations like the Afasa prompt organizations to adopt governance that can adjust to local regulatory lists and frameworks while maintaining consistency across borders.
For Seon Technologies, the opportunity lies in bringing together more risk signals so fraud teams can make decisions in real time when a customer is onboarding or a payment is being processed, rather than reviewing transactions only after the fact.