TransactionLink, which gives onboarding teams a drag-and-drop process builder, has raised a €5 million in a seed round. Led by White Star Capital, existing investor Target Global and new and existing angel investors also participated. The funding will be used as TransactionLink expansion into new sectors and grow its Berlin and London headquarters operations.
The platform radically simplifies essential but complicated, processes that businesses have to undertake when onboarding new customers. Founder and CEO, Mateusz Pniewski, answered TFN’s questions about the platform and the difference it makes.
Eliminating the manual process of KYB checks
TranslationLink began as an open banking services provider. However, it pivoted to onboarding when it became clear that, despite the opportunities of open banking, onboarding was still a major headache for businesses. “We’ve seen a surge in interest for business onboarding automation over the last year,” says Pniewski. “Business services have traditionally been very manual add-ons, but financial institutions have realised that to stay competitive, investing in user experience and process efficiency is key.”
The headache comes from the complexity inherent in Know-Your-Business (KYB) processes. While most people are familiar with Know-Your-Customer processes — providing a driving licence or passport and a couple of recent bills to prove identity — doing the same for a business can seem a never-ending task. “What makes KYB more complex is that entities are owned by other entities or natural persons, and you are obliged to identify and verify all of them,” Pniewski told us. It can mean a repetitive process as ownership is traced through other companies until the ultimate beneficial owner can be identified.
The complexity means KYB checks can become more akin to detective work than business administration, but has also meant they have tended to be manual. However, TransactionLink seeks to end that, offering teams the ability to quickly build their own automations, building workflows that include decision logic and risk assessment, while linking with automated back-end checks. The result is an end-to-end process designed around the company’s needs.
Early traction, and early successes
“KYB has become critical to business offerings globally across a variety of sectors, but building and managing an efficient and streamlined KYB workflow remains tricky,” White Star Capital’s Nicholas Stocks said. “There is a massive opportunity in solving this problem, and we’re excited to see where Mateusz and his team go in the years ahead.”
Addressing a major pain point for businesses has meant that TransactionLink has already had success. It’s now working with over 50 customers worldwide, including Fortune 500 payments provider, Fiserv. This global reach has means it’s already offering 150 integrations with the best-known KYB and KYC data sources. It means that, for the majority of onboarding, manual work is minimised, accelerating the process and reducing churn because of the better service offered to both parties.
The result is a platform that can take the potentially complex and make it simple. “In a nutshell, KYB is a sequential problem that may involve a lot of branching in complex structures,” Pniewski says. For the user, though, it’s little more than putting together a flowchart.
“Our customers use our no-code workflow builder to design the user experience and which data sources should be checked in the onboarding journey,” Pniewski explains. “As a result, customers can build sophisticated if-this-then-that logic for any end-customer behaviour or piece of data found in registries.” The system replaces systems that were entirely manual, or which had been built in-house and required deduced technical support and resources to maintain and update when needed.
One of TransactionLink’s early clients has already felt the benefit of this, Pniewski told us, “in the course of working with a customer for a year, they had to introduce three changes in their processes that resulted from new regulation in one geography and changes in internal risk policies connected with the conflict in Ukraine.”
TransactionLink is using its funding to focus on extending its reach. They currently operate globally from their co-headquarters in Berlin and London, and will be expanding these to support growth as they offer their product to new sectors. However, they are pleased with the impact that TransactionLink has already been having on their customers, where it has already proved its value.
“A major payments provider reported a 70% decrease in manual work,” Pniewski reported. But as impressive as that sounds, Pniewski revealed TransactionLink could offer even more: “The remaining 30% is chiefly due to their legacy policies requiring a human check to be performed but with our technology, they are also looking to modify this!”
