About...
Napier AI is an enterprise SaaS platform trusted by more than 150 financial institutions across the globe.
On a mission to automate the detection and prevention of financial crime, Napier delivers anti-money laundering and financial crime compliance software — helping companies monitor, manage, and prevent risk.
per employee
not weeks
Napier AI
Background check experience
The year was 2024. Napier AI had grown fast — making over 150 hires in just 18 months across offices in APAC, EMEA, and NALA. But with that growth came a background checking process that couldn’t keep pace.
Forced to jump between three different platforms for a single hire, the HR team was losing up to 50 minutes per candidate to admin, referee chasing, and keeping (manual) tabs on the process — time that could have been better spent on the people, not the paperwork.
The problems were hard to ignore for Gemma Wood, Global Head of Talent:
Three-pronged fork in the road
Napier was running background checks across multiple platforms simultaneously — “one for some checks, a separate provider for Cifas checks, and a third to cover different countries,” as Gemma put it.
Every new hire meant deciding which platform to use first, manually inputting their details, and managing a fragmented experience from start to finish.
Compliance held together with spreadsheets
With no centralised system, the HR team tracked everything in a spreadsheet. “We had to keep checking the spreadsheet to make sure we were staying compliant,” said Gemma.
For a tech-led business that undergoes annual ISO 27001 and SOC 2 audits, pulling compliance data from multiple platforms was a time-consuming security nightmare. Especially when you’re running checks across different countries — the UK, US, Malaysia, UAE, Australia, and beyond.
Candidates felt the friction
Working with some of the world's leading financial institutions, Napier is AI-powered, forward-thinking, and built for the most regulated industry on earth.
A manual, clunky, paper-heavy onboarding process told a very different story to the candidates they were trying to impress.
With “all systems go” during their phase of hypergrowth, Napier AI needed a streamlined, smart, and sleek background checking platform that instilled confidence, not chaos, in their candidates.
Enter Zinc.
The stakes were high but looking for a new background checking provider wasn’t hard, as Gemma recalls.
Having been in the HR and talent industry for a long time, she went straight to her network and told them exactly what she needed:
A global, easy-to-use platform that could integrate with PinPoint, Napier AI’s ATS. And something reasonably priced wouldn’t hurt either.
Lucky for us Gemma said, “Zinc came up really, really highly rated from everybody that we spoke to.”
Results
Zinc’s job was straightforward: take the admin off the team’s plate and make Napier AI look good in front of their candidates.
Here’s how we helped:
One platform, full visibility.
Checks now run across 16 countries — from criminal checks in Australia and Poland to Cifas checks required by Napier's clients — all visible in a single dashboard via the Pinpoint integration.
As soon as a candidate signs their contract, the onboarding process triggers automatically, with no manual intervention needed. "From there, we don't have to do anything at all. Everything is all in one place," said Gemma.
Security, IT and payroll teams have full visibility across all regions in real time — and the single point of failure that came with spreadsheet tracking is gone entirely.
Compliance without the chaos.
When asked which element of Zinc she’d call a “game changer,” Gemma was quick to say Cifas checks.
Cifas checks aren't optional for Napier. Since their clients are financial institutions running transaction monitoring and customer screening on some of the world's most sensitive financial data, their bar for who can access those systems is set by contract — not preference.
Zinc allows Gemma and her team to run those checks easily, centralising results along with all other background check data in one platform. And so, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 audits no longer require pulling screenshots from multiple systems.
A candidate experience worth talking about.
When asked what kind of candidate feedback she’s been receiving about Zinc, Gemma had nothing but great things to say.
When a candidate with a complex visa situation needed extra support, she was pleased to see Zinc’s Customer Success team handle it directly, with no escalation to Napier required. "They were coming back to her really really quickly and just getting it sorted, without us having to step in at all," Gemma said.
Napier now runs 12 check types across 16 countries through Zinc — and Gemma wouldn't have it any other way.
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