At ComplyAdvantage, the mission has always been clear: empower every business to eliminate financial crime. By combining AI, a unified platform, and an extensive partner ecosystem, the company helps more than 3,000 enterprises in 75 countries transform compliance from a regulatory burden into a driver of growth, resilience, and trust.

But as ComplyAdvantage looked to expand beyond its traditional enterprise base, a new challenge emerged. Could it serve smaller customers without adding pressure to already stretched teams?

We spoke to Marc Koskela, Director, Growth Marketing, at ComplyAdvantage to understand the internal challenges and learn more about what happened when Alguna transformed a scrappy test into a scalable product-led growth (PLG) engine.

Testing a PLG hypothesis

ComplyAdvantage had long operated with two distinct product offerings: a complex, high-value transaction monitoring for banks and payments firms, and a more accessible screening and monitoring product with a potentially huge addressable market.

The challenge was this: how do we serve smaller customers more efficiently, without consuming the same sales and onboarding resources reserved for enterprise deals?

It was time to test a simple hypothesis: would anyone buy their screening product using a credit card?

Limited internal resources

The team’s first attempt was scrappy by design. With no engineering time, no additional budget, and only a handful of people from marketing and operations involved, they spun up a HubSpot landing page connected to a Stripe checkout.

It worked. Within weeks, orders had started coming through with no promotion at all. The hypothesis was proven: self-serve was viable.

But the hacked-together setup had no chance of supporting a broader product-led growth (PLG) motion. Data lived across HubSpot, Stripe, and was stitched together manually in spreadsheets. There was no subscription logic, no real reporting, no way to automatically onboard customers, and no scalability.

“We would have to reconcile things manually. Someone would fill out the HubSpot form which redirected to Stripe, and then we still had to figure out if they actually bought. It was just very messy,” Koskela recalls.

It was time to look for a long-term alternative.

Turning a prototype with potential into a PLG engine

Proving demand was one thing, scaling it was another. The team knew they needed more than an improvised checkout flow. They needed a partner who could support their tailored requirements without relying on precious engineering time.

Off-the-shelf tools wouldn’t cut it, so that’s when they turned to Alguna, a younger platform that wasn’t going to back down from solving ComplyAdvantage’s PLG challenges at scale.

Migrating from Stripe to Alguna

The team at ComplyAdvantage faced a unique set of constraints.

There were no developer resources available to build or maintain a self-serve channel. At the same time, they also needed to manage a multi-entity legal structure, with custom logic to determine which Stripe instance each customer should connect to, all while handling global tax and compliance requirements.

On top of that, visibility into customer usage was limited, pricing combined fixed fees with overages, and the business required a very complex checkout experience hosted on their own domains.

Because of this, ComplyAdvantage and Alguna agreed on a phased approach.

Implementing a phased approach

The rollout of Alguna addressed these challenges head-on through a phased migration.

First, the team went live with a new self-serve checkout hosted on a custom domain. This gave customers the ability to purchase directly online in a streamlined, branded checkout flow without any engineering lift.

Over the following months, the integration deepened across the organization. Salesforce, Xero and BigQuery were connected, streamlining customer data management and giving the business clear visibility into usage. Soon, custom tax mapping and automated reconciliation were added, eliminating hours of manual compliance work.

Another big milestone was when ComplyAdvantage successfully migrated all of its existing Stripe accounts into Alguna. From that moment, what had previously been a patchwork of systems had been turned into a single, scalable source of truth.

“We were looking for a partner who was able to support our quite specific requirements. That’s where the relationship with Alguna has always been a really positive one—there’s been both flexibility and a can-do attitude. Alguna definitely went the extra mile,” Koskela shares.

Adding usage-based billing

As ComplyAdvantage’s self-serve channel matured, the team expanded beyond simple starter plans into more sophisticated models.

With Alguna, they introduced usage-based billing and automated metering for overages, ensuring that revenue scaled directly with customer consumption. What was once a manual, error-prone process became fully automated.

As Marc notes, “The amount of times we talk about leaving money on the table with overages… automating that solves a lot of challenges.”

Unlocking a new customer segment

The launch of annual plans unlocked an entirely new customer segment for ComplyAdvantage. Many of these were leads that might have been lost in the past, either because they didn’t justify a traditional sales engagement or because managing their contracts would have been too resource-intensive.

Now, they could purchase directly without ever needing to speak to sales—expanding ComplyAdvantage’s reach into markets and geographies the sales team would never have covered.

The result? ComplyAdvantage hit their annual revenue goal—one month ahead of schedule—all thanks to a PLG experiment backed by revenue automation.

Zero effort pricing changes

Crucially, this growth came without operational friction. Over the course of the rollout, ComplyAdvantage executed one major migration and two separate pricing changes—all handled seamlessly by Alguna.

For the ComplyAdvantage team, the process required no additional effort and zero disruption to customers, reinforcing confidence that the system would provide the flexibility needed as their strategy evolved.

Ability to triage demand

Alguna also gave the team the confidence to change how they triaged inbound demand. Where previously every demo request, big or small, had been treated the same, now smaller deals could be routed directly to self-serve checkout.

This freed up sales resources for complex, high-value opportunities, while smaller customers still got a fast, modern buying experience.

“We could confidently route smaller customers to self-serve because the systems matched the customer expectation,” says Koskela.

From a short-term experiment to long-term growth

What began as a simple question—will anyone buy with a card?—has become a durable growth channel for ComplyAdvantage.

Alguna transformed a messy, manual experiment into a scalable revenue engine, enabling the company to unlock product-led growth and profitably serve a broader range of customers. Within the first year, the self-serve channel grew into a global revenue stream, managing subscriptions in markets the sales team would never have reached directly.

Backed by Alguna, ComplyAdvantage’s PLG motion has consistently outpaced SaaS industry benchmarks, giving the team confidence to serve smaller customers seamlessly while focusing sales resources on high-value opportunities.

Today, ComplyAdvantage continues to iterate on packaging, pricing, and customer engagement—knowing its flexible revenue engine is built to last, with no money left on the table.