Santander Financial Crime Transformation Leader Joins ThetaRay to Drive Enterprise AI Adoption

ThetaRay, a leader in AI infrastructure for financial crime compliance, announced the appointment of Luis Pinedo as Chief Strategic Customers Officer. Previously Pinedo was Group VP of Compliance at Santander Bank, where during his 16-year tenure, he led global Financial Crime Compliance (FCC) transformation initiatives across operating models, processes, and technology platforms.

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In his new role, Pinedo will bring key perspectives from tier-one banking operational challenges to ThetaRay’s product development and design. He will lead strategic customer engagement as well as product strategy across ThetaRay’s entire compliance platform, including Transaction Monitoring, Screening, Customer Risk Assessment, and Agentic Investigations.

The appointment comes at a critical time in the RegTech industry, when regulators worldwide are strictly scrutinizing financial institutions’ anti-money laundering (AML) practices, while simultaneously updating their compliance expectations. In 2026 alone, FinCEN has announced a plan to judge programs based on effectiveness, while the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is integrating generative AI across its internal supervisory workflows, and the EU AML Package will require member states to implement ownership registry rules under AMLD6. As a result, financial firms face an urgent mandate to deploy proven, institutional-grade AI architecture.

“After many years working inside a global bank, I believe financial crime compliance is reaching an inflection point,” said Luis Pinedo, Chief Strategic Customers Officer at ThetaRay. “Traditional rules-based approaches are no longer sufficient as regulators themselves become heavily data-led. I joined ThetaRay because AI has been part of the company’s DNA for more than a decade. The use of LLM-based agents is a natural evolution of that journey, and I want to help shape the company’s path to helping banks make that transition in a practical, scalable way.”

“To combat sophisticated financial crime at scale, and meet new effectiveness standards of global regulators, technology solutions must be proven in production,” said Brad Levy, CEO of ThetaRay. “Luis has spent nearly two decades inside one of the world’s largest banking institutions, spearheading the exact enterprise transformations our clients require to satisfy global regulators. His domain expertise will strengthen ThetaRay’s foundational AI infrastructure, which already monitors over $20 trillion in transactions annually of the world’s leading financial institutions.”

By placing Pinedo at the helm of strategic customer and product strategy, ThetaRay reinforces its commitment to delivering an integrated, cross-functional compliance platform that eliminates traditional operational silos, while drastically improving risk reporting to prove effectiveness to modern examiners.

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