UK-based operational risk control data network Acin has closed USD 24 million in Series B funding from a consortium of banks including JP Morgan, Citi, BNP Paribas, Barclays, and Lloyds Banking Group. The investment round was also supported by existing investors Notion Capital, Talis Capital and Fitch Ventures, the equity investment arm of Fitch Group.

This funding will allow for further strategic product development in partnership with investing banks and existing clients. Additionally, it will allow Acin to expand and accelerate into new areas across the financial services industry. Acin’s platform helps financial institutions to digitise their operational and non-financial risk analysis, using data analytic capabilities.

The company has established a network that calibrates data and facilitates the sharing of best practice between firms, underpinned by a standardised library of risks and controls. Founded in 2018, the Acin platform is a global operational risk network meant to connect and quantify data from the world’s largest financial institutions. The firm’s data analytic capabilities can reveal gaps, duplication, and granular areas of weakness, possibly allowing for remediation at lower costs for completeness and optimized operations.

How data helps fintechs As we recently found out from our article with Aaron Goldsmid, VP of Account Security at Twilio, around the world, billions of people trust mobile carriers to keep rich deterministic data about who they are, their SIM card ID, and their individual phone numbers - all in exchange for access to their networks. Between them, carriers verify identity billions of times every minute so people are free to connect and communicate, shop, work, and play to their heart’s content. Connection is seamless and silent and customers trust the billing, whichever networks they jump between, will always be correct.

What makes this carrier data so powerful for fraud teams is that it can be used in the customer journey to verify genuine customers automatically and silently. The game changer here is to connect to mobile carrier APIs around the world and almost instantly background check if a valid mobile number, device, SIM, and username are being used in any login or transaction. Tamas Kadar, SEON's Co-Founder and CEO recommends that companies who are looking for effective online fraud prevention systems prioritise solutions that leverage a true AI brain, as well as Blackbox and Whitebox Machine Learning technologies.

Increasingly, it’s technologies like this that offer the speed, transparency, and robustness needed to beat fraud. Similarly, businesses should also consider solutions, which are capable of analysing the social and digital footprints of potential customers at the point of sign-up. As we enter 2023, solutions of this nature are really starting to stand out in the field of online fraud prevention.

To this end, it remains simply impossible for fraudsters to replicate the digital footprints of legitimate customers on grounds of costs. .