I come from the land of Ireland and moved to the UK at 35 for a new challenge. I really enjoyed the fintech environment and ecosystem in London and the huge amount of startups currently thriving here excited me enough to stay. London is the global leading Fintech startup centre – I couldn’t think of a better place to start KYP.

I’ve worked in risk management for over twenty years in companies like Google, PayPal and I was Chief Commercial Officer at Cybertonica. I’m passionate about solving problems in these environments and have a proven history and background of doing so.

Alan pictured with David Parker Chairman, Mike Coleman CTO & Jack Mulcahy COO

When I looked into the world of Open Banking, I saw that there were no risk products supporting that use case and I realised quickly that we could solve the challenges affecting this industry by creating an orchestrated risk engine using global data sources.

Starting the business KYP was an amazing achievement, in the VC world it’s extremely difficult to raise money as a start up unless you have a fully functioning MVP. We are thrilled to report that KYP has been oversubscribed and we already have 5 customers for testing at the launch of the product in a few weeks.

KYP means Know Your Partner and Know Your Provider. We monitor business risk by connecting API’s and bringing global data points together to generate unique proactive risk alerts for businesses to protect themselves from risk and fraud. Our risk intelligence platform combines this data and intelligently connects it together with our unique AI and Machine Learning database resulting in connections other solutions are missing and gives the end client a complete picture of the partners they rely upon.

We’re not a transaction monitoring platform. KYP looks at holistic business risk, smart data regression models and unique visuals to ensure investigator reviews are simplified. KYP is launching in response to client frustrations with solutions on the market, which were not only expensive but time-consuming, requiring large teams to manually navigate multiple platforms and then distil the data themselves – taking up countless valuable resources.

Funding, funding and funding. It’s great having an amazing idea but you’re not going to achieve anything unless you have the capital raised and supportive investors. 1414 Ventures and other key investors have been amazing at supporting us with the initial investment and opening doors to potential clients.

Industries opening their API’s for more competition brings a whole new market of services they will need for their business. With that comes increased risk. Take Opening Banking for example, which is growing at a phenomenal rate with some analysts saying there is a 30-50% increase per annum. There are now nearly 30 million Open Banking payments being made in the UK every year, without ANY risk scoring platform. Open Finance (Insurance, Wealth etc)is at its early stages and solutions need to be found for these emerging areas. KYP’s real-time continuous monitoring risk intelligence platform will provide Third Party Provider (TPP) Risk Scoring for Open Banking and Open Finance.

We bring value and intelligence to the data that empowers our clients to be able to take action on risks affecting their businesses in an informed manner. We connect data, provide insights and connect entities that result in providing advanced risk alerts that allows businesses to protect themselves, know their partners and build profitable relationships..

I see KYP as the leading global vendor and third party risk management solution with multiple offices solving our clients challenges through our technology.

Technology builds are always difficult and this one has by no means been easy. Peter Thiel states the hardest part of building a business is going from zero to one in the product sense. That has kept me awake at night as there always seems to be one issue after another. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. The odd sleepless night is a small price to pay when our risk intelligence platform will exceed our clients expectations.

I want people to be smart, effective and delivery focused. I also want people who work for me to have a can-do attitude who want to solve challenges for our customers.

We’re going to be the next London based unicorn over the next three years, get in early and enjoy the ride.