Fourthline secures €50m to ‘alleviate compliance burden’ on FIs

Amsterdam-based regtech Fourthline has raised €50 million from a mix of existing and new investors, including Finch Capital.

Fourthline platform’s AI-powered and compliant ‘Know Your Customer’ (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) solutions help banks and financial services providers to tackle financial crime.

The company’s product suite is designed to cover all KYC and AML requirements, right through from initial onboarding, to daily AML monitoring, authentication, and qualified electronic signatures.

It counts N26, Trade Republic, Vivid Money, Qonto and Western Union among its clients.

Fourthline CEO Krik Gunning

Krik Gunning, co-founder and chief executive officer of Fourthline, called the “huge leaps forward in technology” over the past decade “a double-edged sword”.

Gunning said: “While consumers benefit from easier and quicker access to banking products, the nefarious actors have leveraged technologies, such as deepfakes and social engineering, such as money mules, to increase the sophistication of their fraudulence.”

“In order to hold back the tide of financial crime, a raft of KYC, AML and anti-fraud technologies have been developed,” he added.

“Simultaneously, legislators have tried to keep up, which has increased the regulatory burden on companies. However, a lot of regtech point-solutions do not truly alleviate the compliance burden on regulated entities, as evidenced by the thousands of employees performing manual checks at banks that have deployed point solutions.

“At Fourthline, we provide financial institutions with a single, banking-grade solution for continuous, ‘lifetime’ financial compliance.”

Since its inception in 2018, Fourthline has established offices in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Barcelona, Spain, and employs more than 270 people across the Netherlands, France, Spain and the UK.

Finch Capital’s managing partner Radboud Vlaar, said: “We’re big believers in tackling the compliance challenges in this industry through a focused growth strategy, leveraging a platform approach using proprietary technology.”