Avallone is building a platform to manage the ever-increasing burden of enterprise KYC*
The founders of Avallone have combined their many years of experience from the corporate world, the financial industry, and several startups, to build a platform that unites systems and resources in the fight against financial crime. In this piece, they share how the fintech/regtech startup is executing on their mission; empowering companies to eradicate financial crime while building a tribe of outstanding individuals.
A complementary and experienced founder team
“Anders has worked with financial crime prevention in banks for several years, Martin has experience from building enterprise compliance software, and Thomas has seen a lot of enterprises from the inside as a management consultant.”
“The combination of our experience and insights lead to the idea of solving the KYC (*Know Your Customer) burden from an enterprise perspective rather than a bank perspective.”
“Avallone was founded in the beginning of 2020, just about when the covid lockdowns started. However, we quickly adapted to working under these conditions and started defining, building, and testing their prototype while working remotely. The first customer went live on the platform when fall turned to winter.”
“Our platform enables large companies to handle their anti-money-laundering documentation and processes in a smooth, secure, and compliant manner.”
“We have taken a different approach to the KYC problem than most others. Practically all of the existing KYC solutions are aimed at helping the banks send more KYC requests. Only a couple of other solutions help the companies handle those requests. A major differentiator of our platform is the KYC questionnaire abstraction layer we are building and which we will augment with AI. This will enable companies to re-use data across requests from all of the different banks, which is virtually impossible today.”
We are deliberately blending the best of two worlds
“Probably the biggest win we have had as founders, is the incredible people we have been able to recruit. We are now just shy of 25 people of 10+ nationalities, headquartered in Copenhagen, and with team members in Ukraine, Lithuania, Sweden, Poland, Canada, and the US. About half of the team is within engineering and product, about a third is in sales and customer success, and the rest in HR, strategy and finance.”
“We fuse the best from the corporate world with the best from the startup world. We remain agile and scrappy, we stay hungry, and we have zero patience for company politics. We have titles and an organisational structure, but we encourage and reward great ideas and great initiatives no matter where they come from. When we win big, we celebrate big.”
“In Avallone, we have five key values. Edge, Honor, Empathy, Ownership and Conquer. Every team member receives an extensive founder introduction to our values as part of their onboarding, and every Friday at our all-hands meeting, we share examples of how we have seen the values in action in the past week.”
“The early Avallone team has largely been recruited from our immediate network, but we are increasingly recruiting through targeted ‘cold’ outreach.”
“We use rigorous testing throughout the recruiting process to ensure that we get the right talent at all positions. This is probably an area where our procedures are more structured than what you would see in most other startups at our stage.”
The tech ecosystem in Denmark is thriving and the sky is the limit
“There is a very strong culture of helping each other with sparring and introductions within the Danish tech ecosystem and we are looking forward to sharing our learnings and network with other founders.”
“Setting up a company in Denmark is very straightforward and the strong support we have received from both Innovation fund Denmark and The Danish Growth Fund has been a tremendous help. Furthermore, Denmark is a great place for attracting foreign talent – a lot of highly skilled and resourceful people are keen to move here to study and work.”
“We are convinced that Denmark can breed its own unicorns and create the next generation of globally renowned companies alongside our existing flagships.”
“We don't see a reason why you couldn’t build the tech equivalent of a Lego, Maersk, or Grundfos out of Denmark – as long as you source both capital and talent globally. We don’t really subscribe to the notion that you have to move the company out of Denmark at some point to go big.”
