Fintech startup Effectiv raises $4M from Accel to help banks tackle fraud and improve risk management

Banking and financial institutions have rapidly digitized all their operations, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, fraudulent activities have kept pace too. According to a report from LexisNexis, the cost of fraud for U.S. financial services and lending firms has increased between 6.7% and 9.9% compared with before the pandemic.

Every $1 of fraud loss now costs U.S. financial services firms $4.00, compared to $3.25 in 2019 and $3.64 in 2020. The cost of fraud to banks and other credit unions is estimated at around $19 billion in 2020. But banks are fighting back. Thanks to startups like Effectiv AI, a San Francisco-based fintech that helps financial institutions stop fraud using artificial intelligence (AI) as the change agent. Effectiv founders are all ex-Simility, which was acquired by PayPal in 2018.

To further grow its fraud and risk management platform, Effectiv announced today it has raised a $4 million seed funding round led by Accel, with participation from REV (funded by RELX) and other industry leaders. Effectiv plans to use the funds for technology development, growing the team in the US, and marketing.

In June 2021, Effectiv onboarded its first customer and has already processed over $1 billion in loan volume. After a successful closed beta, the platform is now live and the team is actively onboarding new customers. The company has also brought on board industry veterans Bob Stock as an advisor and Mike Persichini as Head of Sales to kick start their growth in the US.

Founded in 2021 by Anupam Tarsauliya, Jonathan Doering, Ravi Sandepudi, and Ritesh Arora, Effectiv is a next-gen risk management SaaS platform with solutions designed for mid-sized banks, credit unions and fintechs. The founding team has over four decades of combined experience in fighting fraud and building machine learning products at companies like Google, PayPal, Samsung, WalmartLabs, and Hitachi.

Effectiv offers a next-generation, no-code risk management platform for mid-sized banks, credit unions, fintechs and financial institutions. With cutting-edge AI and an intuitive user interface, Effectiv’s solutions enable rapid adaptation to new trends and aim to significantly reduce the cost to manage fraud and risk.

Banking and financial institutions have rapidly digitized all their channels, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, fraudulent activity has kept pace too, with fraud losses pegged at $19b in 2020. Additionally, newer offerings like buy-now-pay-later and peer-to-peer lending have gained significant momentum, adding additional complexity to fraud and risk patterns. In this rapidly evolving world, static strategies can’t safeguard for long.

Effectiv’s founding team were all early team members at Simility, an enterprise fraud prevention company that was acquired by PayPal in 2018 . At Simility and PayPal they had worked on building solutions for organizations like US Bank, Discover, Synchrony and millions of PayPal merchants. The team, with over four decades of combined experience building fraud and risk mitigation systems, started working on Effectiv after they realized that the technologies they have been building so far were often out of reach to smaller financial institutions.

“Dialogues with industry experts from banks, credit unions, combined with our team’s decades of experience in this space, helped us validate the gap that we saw in the market,” says Ravi Sandepudi, co-founder and CEO of Effectiv. “Cutting-edge technologies that drive Effectiv have so far been prohibitively expensive and were designed for and by large organizations. Effectiv aims to change that and truly democratize AI-driven risk management, making it accessible to any financial institution. Every organization, regardless of size, should have access to best in class safety measures to protect their members and customers.”

Ritesh Arora, Co-founder and President at Effectiv, added: “We are building a platform that is designed from the ground up to be extremely easy to integrate and implement. Effectiv comes integrated with best-in-class data services and our proprietary AI decides when to optimally use (and pay for) a data signal. Our goal is to help teams manage their risk strategies without relying on developers.”

“As the world is on a digitization spree, we know that challenging times are ahead for financial institutions. We see tremendous value in Effectiv’s innovative approach to fraud and risk management. Their powerful yet rapidly adaptable AI platform could be the key to identifying these changing trends. We are looking forward to working with the Effectiv team in making these world-class solutions accessible to every financial institution.” says Dinesh Katiyar, Partner at Accel

“We were attracted to the pedigree of Effectiv’s founding team and their decades of experience tackling fraud at some of the world’s largest organizations. As one of the earliest investors at Palantir and with an affiliation to LexisNexis, we are passionate about fraud and risk mitigation and we see Effectiv spearheading a dramatic evolution in this space,” says Kevin Brown, Founder Partner at REV.