The Tallinn-based business Salv has received €4 million as part of a seed funding round extension led by ffVC, a venture capital firm based in New York that specializes in providing seed-stage and early-stage funding to technology companies. German G+D Ventures and existing investors also participated in the round.
Salv has so far secured $7M in venture capital funding.
Due to the fintech sector’s spectacular growth over the past few years, financial crime, particularly fraud, has witnessed a sharp increase.
Financial institutions typically lack the functionality to securely transmit information on suspicious activity since they operate in silos and only have a partial view of suspected criminal activity, whereas multinational criminal organizations regularly collaborate. Salv, an Estonian regtech company that fights financial crimes, enters the picture here.
“The digitalization of the financial industry has resulted in an avalanche of financial crime, and the numbers are only anticipated to climb,” says Taavi Tamkivi, CEO and co-founder of Salv. Our platform for cooperative criminal fighting, Salv Bridge, has successfully fought money laundering, sanctions, and fraud.”
Taavi Tamkivi continued, “The funds enable us to expand into new areas and add functionality to our modular AML toolset, assisting more businesses in enhancing their anti-crime strategies and ultimately protecting their end customers.
Salv’s offering includes all the essential AML (Anti Money Laundering) functionality for financial services companies, including automatically identifying and prioritizing suspicious activity and processing enormous amounts of data in real time. Salv was founded in 2018 by Taavi Tamkivi, Jeff McClelland, and Sergei Rumjantsev.
Salv Bridge’s cooperative crime-fighting platform minimizes non-compliance and financial crime by utilizing the collective power of its network. It enables network users to resolve fraud issues in a matter of minutes rather than days.
The business also employs more than 60 people, including former Skype and Wise workers with expertise in thwarting financial crime.
“LHV Bank took part in the Bridge experiment and observed outstanding results in a short timeframe – authorized push payment fraud incidents reduced dramatically across the network,” stated Andres Kitter, Deputy CEO of LHV UK. Salv’s technologies enable real-time communication with other institutions within the network and give us the ability to implement efficient countermeasures to continually evolving patterns of financial crime where we process payment volumes worth hundreds of millions of dollars every day in the UK.
In response to their investment, Mateusz Zawistowski, the managing director of ffVC, said, “We invested in a working solution that has already been effective against financial crime. For us, a crucial component was the fact that 21 financial institutions in Europe had already signed up for the network’s cooperative crime-fighting efforts, which helped them together resolve around 7000 investigations and stop the flow of €6-7 million to criminals.”
Mateusz went on: “For the network to be more effective in enforcing compliance and combating crime, we see a significant opportunity for geographic expansion and the addition of new financial institutions.
Image Credit: Salv