Singapore-based financial compliance and anti-money laundering start-up TookiTaki has received £9.8 million ($11.7) in a series A funding round led by the US fintech venture fund Viola Fintech.
TookiTaki develops and operates machine learning financial compliance and anti-money laundering software for the banking sector. The funding round comes amid sustained investor interest in startups that can use machine learning and other tools to help tackle huge KYC and other regulatory workloads.
TookiTaki’s Anti-Money Laundering Suite (AMLS) is an end-to-end name screening and transaction monitoring system. It uses a mixture of unsupervised and supervised ML techniques to detect suspicious activity.
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The platform can also highlight high-risk clients and has achieved a 50 percent drop in false positives for transaction monitoring, according to research by Deloitte.
The latest funding round of £9.8 million brings the company’s total to £14.9 ($19.2) following a funding round last March that was led by the London-based start-up financial technology investor fund Illuminate Financial.
Tomer Michaeli, General Partner at Viola Fintech, who is also set to become a member of TookiTaki’s Board of Directors commented in an emailed release that: “With almost twenty years’ experience that Viola has in the AML sector, we found Tookitaki’s approach to be very unique.
“Its pragmatic way of creating an overlay on top of legacy AML systems helps increase accuracy and significantly lower operating costs for financial institutions. Moreover, its regulator-ready “glass box” solution shows an innovative approach and a deep understanding of the challenges in the modern AML solutions market.”
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The company was founded by its CEO Abhishek Chatterjee and Jeeta Bandopadhyay, its current COO. Having worked at JP Morgan during the financial crash of 2008 Chatterjee established TookiTaki to meet the demand for sustainable compliance programs in the banking and financial services industry.
The money from the latest funding round will be used by the firm to ‘aggressively expand’ its R&D team in Singapore, while it simultaneously grows its offices in the US and Europe. Commenting on the investment, CEO Abhishek Chatterjee said: “Sustainability in regulatory compliance is a key question today, as financial institutions try hard to deal with complex transactions, multiple data sources and stringent regulatory demands. FIs keep on spending a lot of time, resources and money on antiquated systems with rules-based workflows and heavy dependency on manual investigation but they have become vexatious for compliance personnel. Not to mention, the huge financial and reputational risk in case of regulatory lapses.”
“We created Tookitaki to help FIs create a sustainable framework by driving effectiveness and efficiency in current compliance programs. From our inception, we have remained focused on research and development (R&D) to provide clients with cutting-edge software solutions that can establish tangible and quick value for investment.”
