INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Salv, an anti-money laundering (AML) startup founded by former TransferWise and Skype employees, has raised $2 million in seed funding.The
round is led by Fly Ventures, alongside Passion Capital and Seedcamp
Angel investors also participating include N26 founder Maximilian Tayenthal (who seems to be doing quite a bit of angel investing), former
Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, and Taavi Kotka, former CIO for Estonia (the actual country!).Founded in June 2018 and initially offering
consultancy, Estonia-based Salv has built a software platform that helps banks find and stop financial crime
The idea, says co-founder and CEO Taavi Tamkivi, is to move AML beyond just compliance to something more proactive that actually does defeat
That’s quite the promise, although he and his co-founders have a lot experience to draw from, both within fast-growing startups and
AML.Tamkivi built the AML, fraud, and Know Your Customer (KYC) teams at TransferWise and Skype
COO Jeff McClelland also worked in the anti-fraud team at Skype, followed by a stint at TransferWise, first as an analyst and then in HR
And CTO Sergei Rumjantsev was also formerly at TransferWise, leading the engineering team responsible for KYC and verification.“This was a
highly demanding role, especially given how fast TransferWise was growing, how many new markets were coming online, and how central user
verification is for compliance,” Tamkivi tells me
“Under Sergei’s leadership, the team made the verification process incredibly smooth over time for genuine customers
But also robust enough to protect TransferWise from on-boarding bad actors”.Bad actors within financial services are aplenty, of course
Yet, despite the European banking sector spending billions tackling the problem, it is estimated that only 1-2% of global money-laundering
is detected.“AML should be all about stopping money laundering but, particularly in the last decade, layer upon layer of regulations have
been added for banks to comply with,” says Tamkivi
“This would be great if that meant that there was no more money laundering, but sadly, that’s a long way off
Today, between $1-2 trillion a year is still laundered
But the excessive regulations mean that nearly all of a bank’s compliance team’s effort goes into compliance
They have very little energy left to actually focus on improving their financial crime-fighting abilities
The software they’re using is similar, focused almost wholly on compliance, not crime-fighting”.That is where Salv wants to step in, and
Tamkivi says the main difference between the startup’s AML software and other existing solutions is a much greater emphasis on
crime-fighting rather than a box-ticking compliance exercise.“We’re aiming to create a transformation similar to what’s happened in
“10-15 years ago virus scanners on everyone’s PCs were an enormous hassle, consumed tons of resources and stopped you from getting work
The same is true in financial institutions today
They’re using outdated, heavy software and processes to handle AML
But today, virus scanning still happens, but nobody’s worried about it
It happens in the background, with few resources
We’ll do the same in the AML world”.In addition, the Salv CEO claims that the company’s software is faster than competitors’
offerings, both in terms of set up time and integration, and making changes to the rules the system adheres to.“Our system, by contrast,
takes a month or less to set up and minutes to modify the rules,” he says
“As a result, our customers can take everything they learn today from new criminal patterns, encode it in automated rules tomorrow, and
repeat that cycle every day to protect their bank
Moving fast is the only way to keep up with the innovative organised criminals moving millions or billions around the world”.To that end,
Salv already counts Estonian bank LHV as its first customer
“They offer a full suite of banking products across Estonia,” says Tamkivi
“They’re also active in London, in particular, supporting fintechs
We have another couple of customers in the Lithuanian fintech scene
One of those is DeVere e-Money”.More generally, Salv’s product is said to be suitable for Tier 2 and Tier 3 banks, as well as regulated
fintechs and challenger banks.Meanwhile, the business model is straightforward enough
Salv charges a monthly subscription, while the price varies based on the number of active customers a bank or fintech has.
