Just when money laundering issue about Danske Bank’s Estonian Bank has last years with a total of $222bn worth of suspicious transactions, another money laundering case about another Scandinavian bank, Swedbank, Estonian branch. Tamkivi has become a hot cake for banks and businesses when it comes to data compliance because of his experience in TransferWise’s KYC and anti-money laundering. Tamkivi said even though banks believe in the power of sharing data to combat these crimes, the fear of numerous data breaches would not allow them to subscribe to the idea. Tamkivi with some colleagues found Salv, an anti-money laundering platform partnering with a local software company Cybernetica, which had developed a new technology called Multi-Party Computation. The technology cryptographically secure communication technology that allows banks to keep their most private data safe, but they can also use it to help other financial institutions make smarter decisions about suspicious activity. With the use of Salv, anti-money laundering specialists will review alerts as they come in, scan through customer behaviour on a single page, and make decisions about whether a customer’s activities are suspicious enough to warrant reporting them to the authorities.
When talking about security, Tamkivi pointed out that Salv’s CTO, Sergei Rumjantsev, led the know-your-customer engineering team, and built up secure processes to securely manage TransferWise’s most confidential data including passport copies. He also disclosed that Salv offers a monthly subscription with varied prices based on the number of customers. There are 10 people working for Salv right now, but the company is looking to hire new people in engineering, marketing, and sales in 2020. The company received $2m in seed funding in December 2019 from Fly Ventures, Passion Capital, and Seedcamp among others. Tamkivi views Germany, the UK, and the Benelux region as the most promising markets for Salv. Tamkivi was confident that had his Salv product been in the market and implemented by local banks about a decade ago, the money laundering scandals of Scandinavian banks’ Estonian branches could have been avoided.
