FrankieOne, a Melbourne-based startup that provides an API platform for identity verification and fraud detection, said it added $23 million AUD (approximately $15.4 million USD) to a Series A+, bringing the Series A total to $45 million AUD (about $30 million USD). FrankieOne says this is the largest amount of VC funding raised by an Australian regtech to date.
The funding included a group of returning investors, including managed lenders AirTree Ventures and Greycroft, and participants Reinventure (financial services firm Westpac’s venture arm), Tidal Ventures and Apex Capital Partners, all of whom are also existing investors. New strategic investors are Binance Labs and Kraken Ventures.
Founded in 2019 by serial fintech entrepreneurs Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper, FrankieOne connects banking, fintech, crypto and gaming companies to hundreds of data sources and partners with 170 financial institutions around the world. The startup says it has seen 4x revenue growth over the past 12 months and its customers now include Westpac, Shopify, Afterpay, Binance, Zipmex and Pointsbet. The team has doubled over the past year and a new office has opened in San Francisco.
Costello told ukbusinessupdates.com that FrankieOne grew out of a neobank venture he also co-founded with Chipper called Frankie. Costello and Chipper wanted Frankie to stand out from the rest of the industry with the best onboarding experience, using the best identity and fraud prevention tools available, but “this process proved to be unnecessarily complex, required multiple integrations, and was clear that we are creating our own risk-based onboarding,” Costello said. They realized that other fintech companies had the same problems.
FrankieOne founders Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper
As a result, FrankieOne was created to streamline regulatory and compliance processes. It now offers a single API that connects third-party vendors to over 350 data sources in 48 countries.
Costello explained that most fintechs, banks and crypto companies face shortcomings in match rates, coverage or scalability because they connect to a single vendor for their identity needs. This means that their tech stacks also require constant maintenance.
FrankieOne solves this problem by connecting to hundreds of data sources from multiple vendor partners, meaning their customers are no longer dependent on a single vendor. The API’s affiliated vendors include established financial services companies such as Equifax, Experian, and Socure, and fast-growing start-ups such as Sardine AI.
“What sets FrankieOne apart is that it enables its customers to switch suppliers, create dynamic workflows, add further fraud signals and add new markets, enabling our customers to respond quickly to changing regulations and updated business requirements, without taking on additional workload. Costello said.
FrankieOne’s clients are typically medium to large organizations in highly regulated industries that must adapt to complex policies that change frequently, he added.
As an example of how FrankieOne has been used by its customers, Costello pointed to the Pointsbet sports betting app, which previously used a single provider for customer onboarding, but had to deal with a large number of potential users that could not be verified in real time. This resulted in customer drop-offs or further manual work to verify their data. Since partnering with FrankieOne, Pointsbet has been able to increase customer onboarding by 14%.
As Westpac began digitizing more of their financial services, they were still using separate legacy systems and as a result had to increase their success rates to reduce outages. They integrated FrankieOne’s platform for their KYC (know your customer) function into their new BaaS (banking-as-a-service). This significantly increased success rates, so the company added FrankieOne to the entire group.
The latest round of funding allows FrankieOne to scale up and expand faster in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Costello said it will also enable FrankieOne to make a significant investment in its ecosystem of vendors, data sources and fraud opportunities, helping it grow its customer base.
