Disclaimer All research on startup and the whole investment memo has been done for personal use of Akim Arhipov.
Mission
Salv is on a mission to beat financial crime.
Imagine a business where an investment of hundreds of billions annually returned a success rate of 1-2%. Thatās the level of effectiveness in compliance currently. But this isnāt just a business concern ā itās a problem that affects our entire society.
Backstory
Taavi Tamkivi (co-founder) left Wise in 2018, where he was serving as a Global Lead of Compliance to start anti-money laundering company. He quickly came across to realise that given industry needs a bigger shift than just advice as companies are lacking modern tools to fight financial crime.
2019 saw a pivot, an addition of Jeff McClelland (ex-Skype, ex-Wise) & Sergei Rumjantsev (ex-Wise) as co-founders and Salv was born.
Problem
Banks work in silos & info moves slowly, leading to:
- Limited information - banks only have their data to decide whether to report to police
- Slow requests - to any other banks, which means they never ask
- Criminals without borders - happily exploit any bank with bad tech or processes
- Gigantic fines - for failing time and again to stop criminal money flowing through
Solution
Salv is offering the solution - Collaborative crime-fighting in networks.
Salv is connecting FinCrime and Compliance teams across bank to share information about high risk customers.
Salvās anti-money laundering SaaS platform is Automatic, Adaptive, Instant and consists of 2 segments of a product:
- Salv AML Platform - SaaS tools in order to perform Screening, Monitoring and Risk Scoring built for modern payment realities. More than any other system on the market, it helps financial crime teams to adapt to new criminal patterns and regulatory requirements with ease, and make decisions on instant payments at scale.
- Salv Bridge - Addresses the critical challenges faced by banks in the realm of information flow and communication inefficiencies. By seamlessly integrating with existing banking systems, Salv Bridge serves as a conduit for breaking down silos and accelerating the exchange of vital information. This transformative solution enables banks to proactively identify potential criminal activities, minimizing the reliance on customer complaints for detection.
Product
Smart AML Platform (Check the video DEMO)
Smart AML platform consist of 3 different pillars, letās examine them one by one:
- Platform allows its customers to screen their customers against Dow Jones sanction lists and custom lists both in real-time or retroactively.
- Salv updates their sanctions lists 3x a day to promptly identify and minimise sanctions risk to its clients business. Custom lists allow you to upload specific lists yourself, whether they are specific to your company or industry.
- You can check transaction references and counter-parties, including bank names and BIC codes, from both Dow Jonesā lists and your own.
- Reduce false positive alerts in sanctions screening with Salv's Auto-Resolution Tool. Clearing most alerts automatically through customizable rules frees your team to address critical matters. Tackle the high volume of false positives efficiently by establishing transparent rules, chosen from a library of 50+ or custom-created with our data team's support.
- With Salv, you can screen bothĀ customers and transactionsĀ against sanctions, PEP, and adverse media lists ā screen any data field you need.
- Monitor your customers and transactions in real time. Run monitoring rules to suspend suspicious payments. By gathering more info, you can stop criminals right in their tracks.
- Post-event transaction data gives you insight to detect and analyse changes in customer behaviour. Identify criminal patterns and reduce risks to your business with no friction to your customer.
- Add as many data fields as you want. Create and test new monitoring rules with zero engineering effort. We haveĀ 100+ monitoring rulesĀ in our library ā adjust them or create your own.
- Monitor counterparties, Salvās counterparty monitoring significantly speeds up the case management: all info is in one place and interlinked. Logical, frictionless user interface makes it easy for agents to dig into cases.
- Make monitoring rules which generate alerts for detecting changes in counterpartyās payment behaviour, so you can make informed decisions about your cases.
Salvās counterparty monitoring is engineered for payment service providers (PSPs), money service businesses (MSBs) and other financial institutions.
- Enhance risk management with Salv's comprehensive capabilities. Gain a comprehensive customer risk assessment, powered by advanced and unlimited risk scoring rules, allowing for a holistic understanding of risk levels.
- Proactively mitigate potential issues by receiving continuous risk updates through API or webhooks, triggered by profile updates, transactions, and alert statuses. Maintain transparency and control with the option of manual overrides for exceptional cases, ensuring clear visibility for your Risk Team.
- Exclude high-risk customers during the onboarding and due diligence process, protect your business and your customers while being cost efficient.
- Salvās risk scoring rules match the latest FinCEN & FCA guidelines and audit scenarios. We update, manage, and optimise risk scoring rules at a minimum cost.
The Bridge (Check the video DEMO)
Criminals work in networks while financial institutions often work alone and with limited data. It takes a network to beat a network ā itās time to take information sharing between financial institutions to the next level.
Salv Bridge is a secure, cloud-based solution that allows financial institutions to exchange and strengthen data on bad actors. Itās 100% encrypted and fully compliant with data protection regulations.
Salv Bridge is suitable solution for: Banks / BaaS providers / Crypto / Neobanks / Fintechs / MSBs
Functionality:
- Boost operational efficiency by automating 50% of RFIs with MSBs, lessening your team's workload. Salv Bridge facilitates encrypted data exchange between systems, utilizing existing information from MSBs, and streamlining simpler name match RFIs. This time-saving automation empowers your team to focus on intricate cases, enhancing overall compliance quality.
- Employ suspicious entity sharing to report and verify potentially fraudulent parties, supporting real-time checks and requesting context. Additionally, Bridge facilitates fund recovery across financial institutions through a secure, encrypted channel, utilizing structured templates, urgency indicators, and a user-friendly web interface/API integration for streamlined action.
- Salv Bridge facilitates public-private partnerships, establishing direct communication between financial institutions and law enforcement. Empowering fincrime teams, it enables investigations, data enrichment, and direct reporting of suspicious activities to pertinent law enforcement agencies. Customizable by jurisdiction, Bridge links financial institutions with relevant law enforcement entities, including FIUs, Police, Tax & Customs, enhancing financial crime combat.
- Whatever tooling you are using, there will always be exact name matches amongst screening alerts ā canāt get rid of them. What you can eliminate though, is bothering customers. Get the necessary info from counterparty financial institutions in the network instead.
- Efficiently uncover and probe money laundering suspicions by partnering with other financial institutions. Accelerate intricate cross-institutional investigations and data gap resolution, all within a seamless UI for streamlined data exchange.
Below, you can also find a Product roadmap from here on:
Market
The total market of European compliance reaches 156bnā¬ per year.
Compared to some other sub-nieces within banking verticals, Salv is tapping into several of those slightly:
- Salvās focuses first and foremost on an emerging compliance category, but also supplements by offering related technology for the same teams within banks & fintechs:
- Screening tech;
- Customer monitoring, risks;
- Bridge - Collaborative Crime-Fighting (EMERGING).
Business
2022 info
Important events in 2022
In 2022, Salv managed to successfully grow its revenue, develop and expand its product offering, strengthen its security controls, close another investment round and receive international recognition for its collaborative crime-fighting solution.
Most important events in 2022:
- x2.3 revenue growth - ca.1,2mā¬ / spend was at ca.2.8mā¬
- Successfully completed SOC 2 Type 2 audit, to strengthen internal security controls
- Expanded to Baltics and Eastern Europe and founded subsidiary in Poland
- Won the RFP to launch Salv Bridge across 11 banks in Latvia
- Recognized by FATF (Financial Action Task Force) and Moneyval audit on Estonia
- Closed 4.5mā¬ euros Seed round investment from existing and new investors
2023 plans
In 2023 Salvās key focus has been ramping up Salv Bridge product group sales and continuing improvement of both of our product groups. This has led to improvement of unit economics, gross margin from existing business and cost of acquiring new customers. Salv plans to double its revenue by the end of the year and launch Salv Bridge networks in the Baltics and UK. Leading into 2024, the priority is to expand the networks in the UK as well as launch additional networks in Scandinavia.
On the product side, Salvās main focus is on launching new components for Bridge while keeping the core focus on privacy by design as well as gradually improving the functionality of Platform to enable Salv to serve larger banks. To finance the growth of the business and launch Bridge networks in the UK and beyond, Salv is going to involve new investments from existing and new investors.
Numbers and Growth
Currently, Salv is showing stable growth and margin for all of its product lines:
As things stand, about 70% of the revenue is coming from the AML Platform but focus of 2023 is to grow % of the revenue delivered by Bridge. Salvs growth is focused on Partnerships as there is a clear network effect once bigger players are being onboarded to the system.
Salv is currently looking at the pipeline of networks worth 125mā¬ ARR
Clients:
To highlight a few:
- LHV Bank (EE / EN) / LHV Pank offers a range of banking services, including retail and corporate banking, investment services, and asset management. It is one of the main competitors in the financial industry.
- SEB Pank (EE) / SEB is a prominent financial services group with a strong presence in the Nordic region and the Baltic countries, offering a wide range of financial services to various customer segments
- Lightyear Financial Ltd (UK) / Lightyear Financial Ltd is a UK-based financial technology company that provides an investment application platform that allows users to invest in stocks and ETFs without unnecessary barriers and fees
- UAB ZEN.COM (PL) / is an electronic money institution based in Poland that focuses on managing card payments in the internet and offers payment gateways, crypto top-ups, and a financial app for managing multiple currencies and sending money internationally
- TrueLayer Limited (UK) / TrueLayer Limited is a London-based company that specializes in open banking payments and provides secure access to banking infrastructure, enabling companies to leverage open banking for smarter and faster online payments.
Why now
Now, it is becoming more relevant than ever. COVID-19 had a huge impact on the volumes of cashless transactions, while the war in Ukraine and all the sanctions that are being implemented towards Russia are forcing criminals to move the assets. It is extremely difficult to keep up with all the limitations, regulations and sanction these days. For a reference:
Team
We are looking at an excellent team of specialist, who are most certainly up for the task.
Taavi Tamkivi, ex-Wise / Co-founder / CEO
Jeff McClelland, ex-Skype / Co-founder / COO
Sergei Rumjantsev, ex-Wise / Co-founder / CTO
Gristel Tali, ex-Katana ERP / CPO
Lauri Haav, ex-Monese / CGO
Ca. 60 employees in total as things stand
Organisation:
Competition
There is an extensive list of competition, yet, there is not much competition when it comes to all-in-one solution, which Salv is representing. The competition comes from two places:
- Salvās business strategy is to partner rather than compete. We will bring our advanced product and āprivacy by designā technology as well as cross-border and real-time capabilities. They will bring the members, communities and local presence.
- They will compete more directly. There wonāt be one global winner, but dominance based on use cases and regions.
- Salv is strongest in APP Fraud and complex money laundering cases, and scenarios where real-time responses are critical plus easy interoperability / API-first product strategy.
To give you some names:
- Ongoing discussions to partner with CIFAS, not compete. They have 600 UK financial institutions as members. Theyāre also especially interested to partner with us to expand beyond the UK (Ireland first) and work cross-border.
- Their technology is 20 years old and works (slowly) for one pre-set use case. Not a suitable platform for the reality in 2023 with faster payments, crypto, virtual KYC, etc.
- Salv is 3 years ahead in development and 2 years ahead with systems being live. Weāve built up a lot of knowledge around āprivacy by designā, use cases that are valuable, and how to meet bank infosec requirements (SOC2, ISO27001, etc).
- Salv overlaps on one use case, but we have multiple functionalities that are proving great value.
- US domestic network only.
- Not built for Europeās much stricter privacy protection regulations (GDPR). Cannot compare to our āprivacy by designā & has no mechanisms to ensure data minimisation
- Despite trying for 2+ years, no European customers
- Theyāre limited to UK, and only faster payments scheme payments
- They really struggle to get good signals - members donāt contribute fraud signals back, and not in real-time, so the power of the system is underutilised
- Weāre likely to partner with them to feed signals from beyond the UK and beyond faster payments.
Round info
Amount: 4-5mā¬. (3.3M is planned for the next 12 months, and any additional included will cover growth for additional months)
Valuation pre money: 27.554mā¬
Cap Table (fully diluted): ca.44% founders / ca.2% early advisors and employees, 44% VCs and Angel investors, 9% ESOP
Investment type: Equity
Committed so far: 2.1-2.7mā¬ from new and existing investors (Passion Capital, ff Venture Capital, G+D Ventures)
Raised until today: 8.2mā¬
fff.vc members
Total allocation: 300 000ā¬
Minimum ticket: 10 000ā¬ First come - first serve
Fee structure: 7% one off + 7% carried interest per SPV