London-based anti-fraud and fintech startup Salviol has raised €6.5 million in a Series A round led by Orange Growth Capital — money it plans to use to expand its European and international operations, and to drive sales.
The company’s flagship FROPS software uses big data to help companies detect and prevent both internal and external fraud, thus targeting the ‘Fraud Detection and Prevention market,’ which, by some estimates, is expected to grow to be worth $20.49 billion by 2019.
Founded in 2009, Salviol originally set out to provide companies and organisations in the financial and government sectors with big data expertise to aid them in their investigation processes, essentially helping them get the right data out of their internal databases, saving time and money. This spurred the development of the startup’s FROPS software and a pivot to focus purely on monitoring potential fraudulent activity through big data analytics.
“Fraud is a major global issue, there is an estimation that every company looses 5-7 per cent per annum to fraud. We are trying to stop and lower that percentage,” says Salviol co-founder and CEO Aleksandar Vidović. “When FROPS is implemented in an organisation, it monitors all of the processes within the organisation and looks for deviances in behaviour i.e. potential fraud.”
To support the FROPS software, Salviol maintains a database of known global fraud schemes, which is continually updated as new ones are discovered. “What we noticed is that fraud schemes are moving globally, so if you see something happening in Eastern Europe you will see the same thing coming to the U.K. in 3 months or U.S. in 6 months. So FROPS serves as an anti-virus tool for fraud,” explains Vidović.
To that end, the company’s main customers are banks, insurance companies and telcos. Meanwhile, Vidović cites the likes of Detica (BAE Systems) and SAS as competitors. “Our main competitive advantage is the existing database of fraudulent schemes and our 12 month money back guarantee — if we do not help our clients prevent at least as much fraud as they paid for FROPS, we give them their money back,” he says.
Noteworthy is that Salviol has been bootstrapped until now and claims to be profitable. “The investment will be spent on further growth (expansion to the U.S, and Asian markets) and we also have some pretty crazy ideas on making FROPS available to end customers in 2016,” adds Vidović.
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