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Fraud prevention start up sees massive global growth
Startup fraud-prevention and identity verification platform, FrankieOne, has closed its Series A $20m capital raising, attracting an all-star investor cast ranging from Robinhood CEO to DJ duo The Chainsmokers.
It was originally backed by AirTree Ventures, Greycroft, 20VC, Tidal Ventures, MantisVC, APEX Capital Partners and ReInventure. So what is FrankieOne?
Launched in 2017, Co-founders Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper were originally looking to build the next great neobank. Along their journey they uncovered a whole set of issues with the customer onboarding process, within the banks that often came at the detriment of customer experience.
Instead of creating a neobank, Simon and Aaron set about creating a start-up to help solve the issues they found.
FrankieOne has quickly become a leading identity and fraud-prevention platform, bringing together ID verification, know your client, know your business, anti-money laundering, fraud and credit tools into a single unified platform for banks and fintechs. It does, what the banks have failed to do.
What the platform does is act as a central hub that connects over 350 world class vendors and data-sources to provide a single reliable, source of truth saving billions in technology costs that require continuous upgrading to stay ahead.
FrankieOne has experienced significant growth driven by international expansion all in the space of just 18 months. Now roughly half of its revenue is from overseas compared with just 1 per cent only six months ago. The platform attracts over 80 new clients across banking, BNPL, digital exchanges and fintech, including tier 1 companies such as Afterpay, Westpac, and Zipmex. To date, all growth has been organic, as until now the company has not had a sales or marketing team.
The platform works by providing convenience via its identity verification and fraud-prevention services via a single unified API. This allows companies to focus on innovation and their core business. This has helped it grow across 46 countries and offer transaction monitoring for both fiat and cryptocurrencies, later this year.
Costello says, “We are extremely grateful to have attracted such a high-calibre cohort of prominent investors who believe in our mission, and are very much looking forward to helping more fintechs scale with our next phase of growth.”
According to a company statement, John Henderson, Partner at AirTree Ventures says, “Know your customer (KYC) and digital identity verification are board-level issues for financial services companies. The current, manual systems used by fintechs and FTSE100 companies alike are both bespoke and broken. The world needs a better solution, and we believe FrankieOne provides it. After seeing the incredible progress and undeniable traction Simon and the team have had, we’re excited to be leading their Series A as they position themselves to be the leading identity verification and fraud risk provider”.
Banks and financial services firms pay big money to acquire customers and put them through verification checks such as the KYC, identity verification and anti-fraud systems. Ensuring these systems are up to date and accurate takes time and is extremely expensive. Getting it wrong, make the difference in keeping a client and losing one. All due to inadequate systems.
FrankieOne’s APIs solves this problem. By taking away this specialised task, not only does it save money but it enables the onboarding of customers while delivering a delightful end user experience.
Financial advisers can potentially use FrankieOne’s services to retrieve existing customer data to prefill fields, verify client identification and streamline the user experience. And if history is anything to go by, the Royal Banking Commission uncovered systemic problems with customer identification among the big four banks. It led to a combined $2 billion in total fines. The old banking legacy technology systems are preventing banks from keeping up with today’s fraudsters.
And with fraud on the rise especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, specialised fraud prevention platforms such as FrankieOne are a lot more effective in helping financial institutions detect and stop fraud.
