The regulatory technology sector has been growing at a feverish rate. Last year, a total of $4.4bn was invested to starups in the space around the world – 2.5-times the amount raised in 2017, data from RegTech Analyst shows.
It is well reported how countries like the US, the UK, Israel, Ireland and Canada are leading the way with RegTech developments. However, countries in Asia, receive little attention. In fact, Singapore is a big player in the sector, not just in Asia but around the globe.
The country has the 10th largest deal share for RegTech deals since 2014 and is responsible for two-fifths of the RegTech investments in Asia.
RegTech Analyst has highlighted just four companies in the country to be on the watch for.
Cynopsis Solutions
The RegTech startup was founded in 2014 and offers clients solutions to automate their KYC processes.
There are four core products offered by Cynopsis: Artemis, Athena, Ares, and Iris. Artemis was built to solve the ever-changing AML/CTF requirements by regulators around the world. It can be used by financial institutions, corporate service providers, accountants and lawyers to automate their KYC, risk assessment, record keeping, screening, and on-going due diligence.
Athena is a transaction monitoring automation service. Designed specifically for the money remittance industry, Athena can support the on-going monitoring throughout a customer’s relationship.
Ares is Cynopsis’ electronic KYC onboarding system which lets businesses conduct real-time verification of the user via video recording and facial movements.
Finally, IRIS assist financial advisers, insurance companies, banks and financial intermediaries with their regulatory requirements with balanced scorecard framework. The solution automates the quarterly sampling of transactions.
The company is led by CEO and co-founder Chionh Chye Kit who is also the founder of another Singaporean startup traceto.io, which offers a global decentralised KYC network. Over his career he has picked up nearly 20 years of financial and capital markets experience in Asia.
Cynopsis has interacted with a number of other companies in the RegTech space, having established a number of partnerships with firms including advisory company RHT Compliance Solutions and LALA World, a financial ecosystem for the underbanked.
A new partnership was formed with digital asset trading platform Wowoo Exchange, just this month. Wowoo offers consumers a user-friendly platform to trade digital assets with secure hot and cold wallet management tools.
One the back of the partnership, Chionh Chye Kit said, “This synergistic partnership results from the shared vision of both companies’ to shape the regulatory landscape in the digital asset space. Cynopsis will work closely with Wowoo Exchange to ensure that the compliance practices adhere to the highest regulatory standards.”
The self-funded company has more than 750 B2B clients and over 3,500 users. Some of its clients include Aviva, MSIG, Avallis Financial, Singx and Ascendas.
Dathena
Data and governance startup Dathena is solving the information risk management problem related to data within organisations by detecting Pll and confidential information and protect or delete data where necessary.
By Leveraging natural language processing, machine learning and deep learning techniques, the platform helps organisations to prevent data loss and improve data privacy compliance. It does this by identifying, classifying, and protecting sensitive information in an accurate manner, it claims.
The system automatically sifts through structured and unstructured data, classifying and labelling files, documents and databases. The technology, which support 70 languages, has an 80-90 per cent classification accuracy rate when unsupervised, and 99 per cent accuracy when semi-supervised.
Additionally, the company can detect real-time data security risks through continuous anomaly detection and prediction of access controls, repositories, documents, users at risk.
GDPR has received a lot of industry focus and received a lot of investment to foster innovation. Of the $10.9bn since 2014 to be deployed into the RegTech space, 15.7 per cent ($1.7bn) has been invested into companies building GDPR solutions. This makes it the third most funded regulation in the RegTech world, which is only made more impressive by the fact it was only revealed in 2016.
The company’s growth is emphasised by the recent close of a new, undisclosed, funding round. MS&AD Ventures, CerraCap Ventures and Demetis all participated in the round in support of its global deployment plans.
Following the close of the round, Dathena CEO Christopher Muffat said, “We are delighted to partner with CerraCap Ventures. This investment will help us fund key hires for our Singapore and European offices in order to respond to exceptional demand from clients and partners for our products and prepare for US expansion.”
Having only just put the funding round behind them, Dathena has already set its sights on additional capital and plans to raise more later in 2019.
Muffat, whom founded the company in 2016, boasts 12 years of experience in the information security risk management space. Some of his achievements in the space include leading the internal HSBC and SwissLeaks digital forensics investigation for a high-profile data theft in Europe. He also established and managed the information risk management function for Barclays Europe and APCA.
Silent Eight
Silent Eight launched in 2013 with a goal of helping banks realise monitisable improvements in their due diligence process by removing their legacy systems, it said. Instead, it hopes the firms will utilise its AI-powered system which can analyse petabytes of data and present functioning results, while lowering false alerts.
Its solution can be easily deployed in a bank and learn how to solve name screening and transaction monitoring alerts exactly as humans do. Everything it learns can be viewed by a bank’s employees and auditors so it can process new alerts before they reach the analyst. The company makes sure that its output looks exactly like something that analyst would write, so instead of starting an investigation from the blank canvas, an analyst can see a description of what happened with all supporting evidence included.
This multilingual identification capability is used in combination with full analysis of other available data (such as dates and places) to confirm a person’s identity with a high degree of certainty and to correctly match names to their actual owners. Silent Eight’s systems also scans all kinds of data sources (structured, semi-structured and unstructured) in variable formats, including local and remote online news articles and databases from reputable sources.
The company’s co-founder and CEO Martin Markiewicz has gathered 16 years of experience with AI solutions and software. Silent Eight is not Markiewicz’s first technology startup. In 2001, he launched his first company, Konsultant.it, which provided software and hardware development solutions for SMEs. Following that, he created SevenFlow Investments, a multidisciplinary engineering company, which later went onto a successful IPO.
With its AI technology, Silent Eight wanted to build a solution which could fully-optimise the most time-consuming process of a bank’s due diligence process.
Last year, Standard Chartered teamed up with Silent Eight in a bid to bolster its fight against financial crime. The deal sees its Financial Crime Compliance teams leverage the Silent Eight machine learning and natural language processing software to improve the name screening process and reach decisions much quicker.
The process involves customer and related party names being matched against various watch lists through Silent Eight’s optimisation engine which learns to replicate the assessment in the same way a human analyst would. Each risk event is reviewed through both private and public domain data to provide true or false match recommendations.
Silent Eight has closed three rounds of funding, each of which were for undisclosed amounts. The startup is backed by a number of venture firms from Silicon Valley and Singapore, including Wavemaker Partners.
Datarama
Datarama Technology is a one-stop source for ‘hard-to-find information and risk analysis in Asia.
When starting up, the company set out with an aim of establishing a comprehensive and cost-effective due diligence research platform.
Combining advanced AI technology with human analysis, the company can offer a complete business intelligence solution, improving due diligence and deal identification. It covers more than 500,000 companies and over 710,000 individuals, mapping out 1.6 million relationships between them. Its client base is made of sovereign wealth funds, investment firms and private equity firms.
Datarama offers data on private companies in Asia, with a focus on Emerging markets, which can be used to visualise the key relationships, find obscure information and highlight hidden associations.
The company has raised capital from a range of angel investors and financial institutions and is backed by Asia-focused private equity firm TC Capital.
Alongside investments, the company has also established partnerships with players in the space. One of these is with data company Liberty Asia, giving the RegTech access for data sharing with non-governmental organisations.
The company was founded 2015 by Raphael Bouzy when he noticed a gap in the due diligence space. While working in a risk consulting firm in Singapore during 2010, Bouzy oversaw more than 200 due diligence and business intelligence projects in a range of industries and countries in the region. While serving in this role he found limitations within the traditional risk consulting model, particularly with new compliance requirements coming in. He created Datarama to build a tool for due diligence, KYC, business development and relationships management in Asia.
The company has received a number of accolades and awards in the RegTech space. Speaking on these honours, Datarama CEO and co-founder Raphael Bouzy said, “We developed our RegTech platform with the objective to leverage big data and technology to revolutionise the compliance and due diligence space. These awards are a recognition of our achievement in making due diligence and compliance in cheaper, faster and more efficient.”
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