Apr 6, 2015

Follow CommentsFollowing CommentsUnfollow Comments Prashant Muddu and Andrea Weist met while they were working on bank compliance issues in Deloitte ’s financial services practice in New York. “Banks were struggling to operationalize this, because there was no solution that did this end to end,” said Muddu, CEO and managing director. “We decided we should start this on our own.” So in 2010 they quit and founded Jocata . The company provides sophisticated Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) software that reduces the cost of compliance by creating a high-quality, standardized and reusable data asset. “When we did regulatory consulting, we saw a real need for a technology solution that addressed the issue from an enterprise perspective,” said Weist, managing director. “We now sell to India and Europe and want to understand problems in the APAC region. While regulations are global, each bank suffers from local variations of the problem.” Jocata uses advanced algorithms and pattern recognition to identify suspicious customers and transactions. “Terrorist financing patterns are hard to detect because the amounts are at a lot lower and don’t necessarily flag as suspicious,” Muddu said. The company’s Web site says it combines a flexible KYC engine with the ability to manage clients centrally while adhering to local laws on data privacy and data location. Jocata provides risk models, or lets banks develop their own within the system, and it can verify identity with both documentary and non-documentary methods. It also groups individual customers by household to show otherwise hidden relationships. Finally, it offers banks the opportunity to earn some ROI on this regulatory compliance expense — they can mine the customer data to cross-sell products and services. Muddu moved to India to set up the technology team. Then last year a partner at Accenture told him about the new Fintech Innovation Lab being inaugurated in Hong Kong, following successful launches of similar labs in New York and London. “We applied on the last day,” he said. For 12 weeks Jocata and Weist, along with seven other technology companies  — out of more than 100 applicants for the program — worked closely with executives from leading banks operating in Asia and learned about the range of challenges they face. Page 1 / 3