After increasing its KYC (Know Your Customer) activities in 2019, Dutch fintech startup Safened was rebranded as Fourthline and now has raised €50 million from Dutch VC Finch Capital, which backs finance, health, and real estate tech in Europe. Among their previous investments are Webio, Twinco Capital, and a Dutch Buy-Now-Pay-Later company in3.
The new funding, backed by other new and existing investors, will help the AI-powered company become Europe’s undisputed tech platform of choice for reducing compliance burdens.
Krik Gunning, co-founder and CEO, says: “We are on a mission to help regulated entities fight ever more complex financial crime. The huge leaps forward in technology over the last decade have been a double-edged sword: while consumers benefit from easier and quicker access to banking products, the nefarious actors have leveraged technologies such as deepfakes and social engineering such as money mules to increase the sophistication of their fraudulence. At present, approximately €1.8 trillion dollars are laundered every year.”
Gunning continues, “In order to hold back the tide of financial crime, a raft of KYC, AML and anti-fraud technologies have been developed. Simultaneously, legislators have tried to keep up, which has increased the regulatory burden on companies. However, a lot of RegTech point-solutions do not truly alleviate the compliance burden on regulated entities as evidenced by the thousands of employees performing manual checks at banks that have deployed point solutions. At Fourthline, we provide financial institutions with a single, banking-grade solution for continuous, ‘lifetime’ financial compliance. This is what we do.”
Combating financial crime
The Amsterdam-based company was founded in 2017 and is one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintech companies. Each day, Fourthline verifies the identity of thousands of new customers for banks and fintechs.
For customers such as N26, Qonto, Trade Republic, FlatexDEGIRO and Scalable Capital; and other regulated financial institutions such as NN and Western Union, and many others, Fourthline verifies millions of identities. Using the most innovative technology to develop the safest and most customer-friendly digital KYC solution, the company says that their mission is to protect the online financial system by providing best-in-class fraud detection, as well as industry-leading conversion and compliance levels.
Founded by Krik Gunning and Chris van Straeten — the company has been quite successful so far. Fourthline now employs over 270 people across The Netherlands, France, Spain and The UK, has a proprietary technology developed in-house; explainable automation powered by ethical AI and has raised more than €65million funding so far.
Radboud Vlaar, Managing Partner of Finch Capital, comments, “We’re big believers in tackling the compliance challenges in this industry through a focused growth strategy leveraging a platform approach using proprietary technology.”
