UOB’s regtech partner pushes ahead with AI and ML-powered solution for anti-money laundering and reconciliation issues.
Tookitaki Holding Pte. Ltd. (Tookitaki), a Singapore-based regulatory technology (regtech) company has announced that it has raised an additional US$11.7 million in funding from global investors.
With this additional investment, Tookitaki has extended its Series A funding round to US$19.2 million, among the largest for a Singapore-based regtech.
Tookitaki has partnered with United Overseas Bank, the third-largest bank in South-east Asia that has 500 offices across 19 countries, to operationalize a machine learning (ML)-powered anti-money laundering (AML) solution within the bank’s current infrastructure. The recent production results have surpassed pilot success.
Viola Fintech and SIG served as lead investors, followed by Nomura Holdings through its venture capital arm (Nomura Incubation Investment Limited Partnership). The round was also joined by the Company’s existing investors including Illuminate Financial, Jungle Ventures and Spring SEEDs Capital, an investment arm of the Singapore government.
A pioneer in launching explainable ML models in the compliance space and validating them with global banks and reputed third-party consultants, Tookitaki recently filed a patent on explainable AI and ML framework and models to bring transparency into the validation process and output interpretability by banking customers and regulators.
The regtech company was co-founded by entrepreneurs Abhishek Chatterjee, its CEO, and Ms. Jeeta Bandopadhyay, its COO. Abhishek, a former associate at JP Morgan, had observed the 2008 financial crisis first-hand, following which he noted that regulators were stricter about financial checks and balances in a bid to maintain financial stability. However, the overall volume of digital banking and e-money transactions rose swiftly over time. Tookitaki was formed from this need to provide sustainable compliance programs in banking and financial services industry (BFS), using technology that is powered by machine learning and distributed data-parallel architecture.
Chatterjee shared: “Our vision has always been to revolutionize regulatory compliance and ensure sustainable compliance programs for every financial institution in the world. Backed by our strategic global investors, we are better placed to deliver on this vision by growing our presence significantly across the US and the Asia Pacific region.”
“Tookitaki will use this funding to continue to focus on research and development and double the team strength across its offices in Singapore, India and the US. This will enable us to offer our partners and customers, some of the largest financial institutions in the region, enhanced solutions around the AML and reconciliation spaces, driving sustainability in their systems, processes and software investments,” he added.
In addition to its US expansion, the company will aggressively expand its R&D team in Singapore and Bangalore, India. To drive this initiative, it has appointed Subhas Samanta, former Director at LinkedIn, as Vice President of Research and Development of Tookitaki.
