Discover how Dossiers and its Cosmos knowledge graph are building the trust architecture needed to automate verification, ensure Prevention of Money Laundering (PMLA), and move from reactive enforcement to proactive risk prevention.
The Sri Lankan Scam Surge: A Digital Crisis
Over the past year, Sri Lanka has seen a sharp escalation in online financial scams - from pyramid-style investment schemes and impersonation fraud to phishing attacks conducted through social media and messaging platforms.
The Sri Lanka Police and the Criminal Investigation Department have recorded thousands of complaints, while the Financial Intelligence Unit Sri Lanka has intensified warnings around suspicious transactions and compliance obligations.
When Compliance Becomes Personal: The PMLA Reality
The stakes are not merely institutional. Under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act No. 5 of 2006, directors and officers of financial institutions face personal criminal liability - including imprisonment for five to twenty years - if their institution is found to have facilitated money laundering or failed to maintain adequate customer due diligence and sanctions screening.
As Sri Lanka prepares for international evaluation of its AML/CFT framework, regulatory scrutiny is only increasing. The signal is clear: digital activity is compounding risk, and legacy verification processes are struggling to keep pace.
This is precisely why we backed Dossiers.
The WatchDog Legacy: Forging Verification Under Pressure
Dossiers began by reimagining compliance data infrastructure - structuring fragmented intelligence into usable, searchable, decision-ready insights. The team’s capabilities in real-time data verification were forged at WatchDog - a pioneering citizen journalism initiative that gathered, verified, and published politically and economically sensitive information at the grassroots level during Sri Lanka’s most volatile periods. This experience in rapidly processing high-stakes, contested information under scrutiny has directly informed the rigour behind Dossiers’ compliance infrastructure.
Building the Trust Ecosystem: Market Leaders in Action
Over time, the company has built growing partnerships across Sri Lanka’s capital markets and financial services ecosystem, including NDB Securities, Sampath Securities, Asha Securities, Asia Securities, NDB Wealth Management, KOKO (BNPL), and Mercantile Investments. These partnerships reflect market trust in Dossiers’ underlying compliance and data capabilities.
That foundation has now evolved into DossiersOS. DossiersOS streamlines, search, automates document verification, and modernises digital onboarding across regulated sectors, with Cosmos serving as the underlying knowledge graph that maps entities, individuals, and relationships in real time.
As founder Nisal Periyapperuma recently shared, Cosmos was shaped directly by operational bottlenecks observed in the market. Years of applied work in document intelligence have been consolidated into a platform engineered for scale - reducing manual intervention, accelerating onboarding timelines, and strengthening verification accuracy.
Why does this matter?
Most modern scams exploit process friction: delayed checks, siloed databases, and human fatigue in document review. Cosmos addresses these gaps by enabling institutions to verify identities and documentation at speed, while maintaining compliance rigour.
For financial institutions, fintech operators, and other regulated entities, compliance is no longer procedural - it is strategic infrastructure.
At nVentures, we invest in companies building trust architecture for emerging markets. Dossiers is helping shift Sri Lanka’s ecosystem from reactive enforcement toward proactive risk prevention.
In a rapidly digitising economy, resilient verification systems are not optional. They are foundational.