Komplant, a startup that provides an “AI-driven” business onboarding and risk scoring platform, announced today that it has raised $14 million in a seed round led by Phase One Fund, led by former Visa President John Partridge and current CEO Stuart Sopp. The funding will be used to support Compliant’s product development, CEO Edward Katzin told TechCrunch, as well as to expand the company’s customer base and hire additional team members.
Complant has a curious history. Embedded by Snoop Dogg’s (yeah, That’s what he said. Snoop Dogg) Casa Verde Capital, a venture firm focused exclusively on the cannabis industry, Komplant was initially set up to address the pain points surrounding payments in the marijuana business. But it gradually became a widespread solution for financial institutions, says Katzin.
Prior to founding Compliant, Katzin was head of global new products at Visa (and partridge interest) and director of global retail payments at Apple. As for Komplant’s second founder, Brad Wiskirchen, he was chairman of the board at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and a member of the International Monetary Fund’s Interdepartmental Working Group on Finance and Technology.
“The pandemic has been a huge tailwind for Complant, accelerating the use of electronic payments, online banking and digital boarding and verification services by financial institutions,” Katzin said. “As a result, the accessible market for compliant services continues to expand rapidly.”
Image Credits: Obedient
Complant’s platform enables customers — typically buyer processors, banks and sales organizations — to build credit risk programs using services such as auditing, application processing and verification, and trade monitoring. Sales and finance teams can use Compliant tools to design the data capture, workflows, pricing algorithms and credit decision rules that drive their programs, while regulatory teams can use startup solutions for risk and compliance management.
Katzin noted that financial institutions are dealing with regulatory oversight — keeping complan expansion in mind. Fines and penalties against financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and others reached $10.4 billion in 2020, according to Fenergo analysis.
“Using a configurable compliance platform means a financial institution has more time to focus on revenue growth and portfolio expansion by making their customer onboarding, targeting, activation and tracking seamless,” said Katzin. “The technology helps companies increase profitability by improving customer acquisition efficiency, decision making and account activation. With improved authentication, businesses can improve customer conversion, cycle time, business monitoring and response to fraudulent activity.”
Komplant is certainly not the first provider to offer such services. Rivals range from Aloy (estimated at $1.35 billion in September 2021) and Fenergo ($800 million) to smaller players such as Fonoa, Passfort, Frankie On, Flag and Salve. But Katzin, rightly or wrongly, argues that there is no competitor that covers the “full spectrum” of compliance and monitoring services “beyond the business life cycle.”
“In reality, when we look at end-to-end business compliance and underwriting, we compete a lot with email, Excel spreadsheets and manual processes,” Katzin said. “Compliant Management is taking advantage of the current market conditions and the capital available to provide exceptional services.”
Complant has completed several pilots while in stealth mode and now has several “revenue-generating” customers, Katzin said. In the coming months, the company will work with partners to develop new offerings, including from several German credit bureaus, information service providers and fraud prevention platforms.
