Accend
Accend accelerates onboarding and KYC reviews for fintechs and banks
Accend is a step-by-step guided workflow for Ops & Compliance teams to accelerate and automate manual reviews. Growing B2B Fintechs and BaaS providers continuously face the challenge of inefficiency and low quality output. Accend helps Ops professionals by automatically (i) doing online searches and (ii) generating regulatory reports like CDD/EDD, thereby saving hours per manual process, such as KYB applications, Disputes, Transaction Monitoring, etc. Accend Founders previously led Engineering and Product for Risk at Brex where they saw this problem firsthand while working with Risk Ops & Compliance folks on a daily basis.
Jobs at Accend
Active Founders
Pranjal Daga, Founder
Currently, Cofounder of Accend. Previously, I led Product for Risk at Brex & saved $20M in fraud losses. Before that, I dropped out of my PhD in AI/ML at Purdue University to help set up Cisco Innovation Labs where I grew the team from 1 to 35 in 4 years.
Yutong Pei, Founder
Yutong Pei was most recently the Engineering Manager on the Fraud Risk team at Brex where he built the Disputes service, worked on fraud controls by managing engineers and data scientists. Previously, he has led Fraud Engineering and Security for IoTeX, Uber and Amazon.
Joseph Zhou, Founder
I'm one of the Co-Founders of Accend. Previously, I served as the CFO of a mobile gaming startup based in Singapore with a 50M ARR. I established the company’s licensed poker operation in Europe and scaled the team from 0 to 80 members, while also managing KYC, AML, compliance, responsible gaming, and fraud prevention.
Company Launches
TL;DR
Accend accelerates manual reviews and automatically generates regulatory reports for Ops & Compliance teams.
B2B Fintechs and BaaS providers utilize Accend to save hours per manual process, such as KYB applications, Disputes, Transaction Monitoring, etc.
If you work in Ops & Compliance at fintechs, we’d love to chat with you. Please reach out at founders@withaccend.com
How we know this is a problem?
When we led Product & Engineering on Risk at Brex, we collaborated with Ops & Compliance teams on a daily basis. For Ops, one of the biggest pain points was declining Ops efficiency + quality of output. For Compliance, it was maintaining healthy relationships with banking partners and regulators. The reasons behind that were:
- Complex Processes: Expanding customer base led to complex reviews due to diverse profiles and services, complicating the process. Moreover, manual reviews are prone to errors and inefficiencies due to overwhelming data verification tasks.
- Regulatory Compliance Burden: Adhering to changing regulations in compliance (esp in KYC) required meticulous attention to detail, slowing down reviews.
- Scaling via Outsourced Ops Teams: We noticed a skills gap in outsourced teams regarding regulations and fintech processes, impacting review quality. Training them for consistency took significant time and investment.
- Time-Consuming Regulatory Reports: Creating detailed regulatory reports like Customer Due Diligence (CDD) and Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) demanded significant time, complicated by language and cultural challenges, subsequently influencing the clarity and level of detail.
This posed
- Business Risk - suboptimal customer experience at the time of onboarding and worse, rejection of a legitimate customer, thereby losing revenue.
- Compliance Risk - hefty penalties (eg: Coinbase’s $100M fine), legal consequences, significant damage to the company's reputation, and even the potential loss of banking partnerships (existential crisis alert!).
We realized Brex wasn’t the only fintech dealing with such risks tied to manual reviews, and we started Accend to tackle these challenges head-on.
Our Solution
Our first use case is accelerating KYB manual reviews. It includes the following features:
Guided Review Workflow: Accend simplifies the KYC procedure by converting the Standard Operating Procedure into a user-friendly, step-by-step guided review process for both internal and external Operations professionals.
Streamlined Online Research: Instead of juggling numerous browser tabs to validate information about the business and its beneficial owners/controllers, Accend consolidates data through comprehensive web searches, presenting a summary for validation by Ops professionals.
Automated Due Diligence Reports: Traditionally, crafting a CDD/EDD report can take up to 2 hours. Accend automates this process, generating high-quality narrative reports in the company's required template, thus saving valuable Operations time on a daily basis.
Audit Logs: Accend establishes an audit trail for actions taken by Operations professionals and the automated processes during KYC manual reviews. This eliminates the need to scour various sources, extract logs, and document them, streamlining the auditing process
Why Accend?
With Accend, Fintechs can
- Improve Ops’ quality of output with consistent procedures
- Increase Ops’ efficiency with automation
- Reduce cost in managing Ops teams
- Maintain healthy relationships with banking partners and regulators
Who are we?
Pranjal Daga was most recently the Product Manager on the Risk team at Brex where he reduced fraud losses by $20M and worked on disputes, declines, login friction, etc. Before that, he dropped out of his PhD in AI/ML at Purdue University to help set up Cisco Innovation Labs where he grew the team from 1 to 35 in 4 years.
Yutong Pei was most recently the Engineering Manager on the Fraud Risk team at Brex where he built the Disputes service, and worked on fraud controls by managing engineers and data scientists. Previously, he has led Fraud Engineering and Security for IoTeX, Uber, and Amazon.
Joseph Zhou was most recently the CFO of a mobile gaming startup based in Singapore with a 50M ARR. He established the company’s licensed poker operation in Europe and scaled the team from 0 to 80 members, while also managing KYC, AML, compliance, responsible gaming, and fraud prevention.
Our ask
We’re looking to connect with Ops & Compliance leaders at B2B Fintechs and BaaS providers to explore how Accend can help them improve Ops efficiency & quality and excel on compliance.
Launch YC Promo
We’re offering 60 days of free pilot for new customers through the end of August.
We will work with you regularly to learn about your process, create customized guided review workflows for your company and support you in every way while you’re using Accend.
Check us out at https://www.withaccend.com/, drop me a note at pranjal@withaccend.com, or schedule a demo to get started.
Thank you 🙏