Richard Churchman

About

Richard is a senior Cloud Architect and Software Developer with over twenty years of experience delivering enterprise-grade financial crime, fraud, and AML technology solutions for major global institutions. Based in Cyprus and working internationally across EMEA and Asia, he specializes in the design and implementation of high-throughput, real-time transaction monitoring systems for banks, PSPs, and financial service providers. Richard founded Jube after designing and deploying a real-time AML transaction monitoring platform for a major PSP handling 1.6 million daily transactions. The platform passed both Mastercard and external AML audits, validating its effectiveness and enabling the client's continued licensing and operational compliance. He open-sourced the core system as Jube, now averaging 30 weekly codebase clones and actively used by organizations with in-house engineering teams. His AML and fraud prevention experience includes building platforms that process over 100 million transactions per day for Tier-1 banks, payment processors, and global enterprises. He has implemented critical fraud and AML screening systems at Mastercard, FIS, Capital One, Experian, and multiple leading banks across EMEA, with MasterCard EMS and DMS implementations spanning Europe and Asia. Richard maintains deep regional expertise across the Gulf and broader Middle East, currently delivering: Multi-tenanted transaction fraud monitoring for a high-volume bank PSP in Pakistan, supporting multiple payment channels with highly available infrastructure using Docker Swarm, Redis, PostgreSQL/Patroni. Real-time card fraud and eBanking fraud prevention for a large bank in Lebanon, a Kuwaiti bank in Egypt, and the largest bank in Egypt. Corporate credit lending marketplace for a development bank in Qatar, aggregating lending from regional banks using advanced real-time data pipelines. Financial statement automation product in Saudi Arabia, integrating with local credit bureaus. Working for a regional partnership with Moody's CreditLens, supporting 130+ banks across the Middle East as Chief Software Architect. His regional consulting includes supporting financial institutions across Lebanon, Egypt, the Gulf, and wider EMEA with fraud prevention, AML controls, real-time monitoring, and regulatory compliance implementations. Richard's career includes leadership roles at Mastercard (presenting at fraud conferences to 200+ industry professionals), FIS, and other Tier-1 institutions. He founded and successfully exited a fraud prevention software company, acquired by a U.S. NASDAQ-listed corporation. Additional experience includes Moody's CreditLens regional architecture, ISO27001 automated compliance platforms using LLMs, IoT analytics for a major U.S. airline (400k device fleet), and mission-critical projects including a 12-billion-record cloud data migration. Richard has trained over 500 professionals worldwide in machine learning, R, SQL, and risk analytics, delivering developer-centric AML training for institutions adopting or modernizing their financial crime technology stack. His advanced analytics training manual consistently receives five-star ratings, with reviews citing it as "perhaps the best, most to-the-point course in machine learning with R ever." Richard is a hands-on architect with deep expertise in C#, .NET, TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis, and cloud environments including Azure, AWS, and DigitalOcean. He builds horizontally scalable systems, leads code standards and reviews, and supports engineering teams through modernization, refactoring, and best-practice implementation. Richard brings a rare combination of AML domain expertise, enterprise-level engineering capability, and proven Middle East delivery experience, supporting clients in adopting, enhancing, or re-platforming AML and monitoring systems with a practical, evidence-based approach that balances regulatory expectations, technical feasibility, and long-term maintainability.