Salv, the regtech startup founded by former Wise and Skype employees, closes a €4m seed round extension led by ffVC, with German G+D Ventures and existing investors also participating. The funds will allow Salv to further develop its modular regtech technology and support geographical expansion to new territories, including Poland.

Salv’s collaborative crime-fighting technology

Salv’s offering entails all the necessary AML functionality for financial services companies, such as automatically identifying and prioritising suspicious activity and processing vast amounts of data in real-time. The company’s toolset also includes its proprietary collaborative crime-fighting platform - Salv Bridge, which uses the collective power of its network to minimise non-compliance and financial crime.

The world’s first fully GDPR-compliant platform, Salv Bridge, enables collaborative investigations between financial institutions by opening a direct line of communication - allowing them to exchange and enrich data on potential threats. This helps network members solve fraud cases in minutes, not days. By utilising this collective intelligence from financial institutions within the Bridge network, Salv’s tools can adapt to evolving threats.

Taavi Tamkivi, CEO and co-founder of Salv, commented on the new market entry: “The digitalisation of the financial industry has resulted in an avalanche of financial crime, and the numbers are only projected to grow. our collaborative-crime fighting platform, Salv Bridge, is proven to be effective against money laundering, sanctions and fraud. The funds allow us to add further functionality to our modular AML toolset and expand to new markets, helping more companies greatly improve their crime-fighting measures and thereby protect their end-customers.”  

Why collaboration is needed to effectively fight financial crime:

Taking advantage of the explosive growth of the financial technology industry, financial crime -  especially fraud - has recently seen a meteoric rise. The low-risk, high-profit nature and the low probability of prosecution due to the complexity of cross-border investigations make fraud an attractive activity for international organised crime groups, who benefit from differences in national legislation.

Criminals are successful because they have large, efficient international networks for sharing information, whilst financial institutions lack the means to securely and effectively exchange information on suspicious activity. Operating in silos, they try to solve problems individually, often losing precious time, which is crucial for a successful fraud recall.

Andres Kitter, Deputy CEO of LHV UK, said: “LHV Bank took part in the Bridge pilot and saw excellent results in a short timeframe - authorised push payment fraud cases dropped significantly across the network. In the UK, where we process payment volumes worth hundreds of millions every day, Salv's solutions allow us real-time communication with other institutions within the network and provide us with tools to apply effective countermeasures to constantly changing patterns of financial crime.” 

Mateusz Zawistowski, Managing Director of ffVC, commented on their investment: "We invested in a working solution that has already proven effective against financial crime. For us, an important element was that 21 financial institutions in Europe have already joined the collaborative crime-fighting network and collectively solved almost 7000 investigations, helping to prevent €6-7m from reaching criminals. We see a huge potential for geographical expansion and more financial institutions joining the network to improve their compliance and crime-fighting capabilities.