An Interview with Florian Clever, cleversoft group CEO: ‘Our Vision is to Support Our Clients with a Unified Solution for Regulatory Challenges’

“We produce millions of regulatory documentats, monitor millions of transactions with our solution using sophisticated algorithms and AI to reduce the number of fraud signals to be produced.”

Far too many in the financial services industry believe that the only way to secure data is to lock it down, and that private, self-controlled servers will protect their data. This is a misconception—especially in complex enterprise IT environments. It is a challenge to drive consistent governance and tooling in these traditional environments, even more so at an enterprise scale. The cloud lays the foundation to overcome these challenges and help companies apply new technologies more easily to further enhance security.

In light of the foregoing, we’re thrilled to present cleversoft group — a leading cloud-based RegTech provider for financial services. The company optimizes and automates business processes for regulatory documents & reporting, AML, KYC, marketing processes for over 300 clients around the globe.

The company was incorporated in 2004 and is headquartered in Munich, Germany. It has additional office locations in Amsterdam, Den Haag (Netherlands), Luxembourg (Luxembourg), Sofia (Bulgaria), Nuremberg and Frankfurt (Germany).

Florian Clever, cleversoft group CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. Explain your services in brief.

Our vision is to support our clients with a unified solution for regulatory challenges. For this reason, we aim to offer a complete digital suite of regulatory tools. As of today, we perform the digitization of regulatory processes as ‘managed services’ for PRIIP, MiFID II, 5 AMLD, Solvency II, IFRS 17, Finrep/Corep, FinSA, etc.

We are proud of having established ourselves as a supplier mastering the above regulations producing legal documents, reporting directly to the financial regulators, and preventing financial crime.

Q. How does ‘automating compliance tasks’ help in reducing operational risks?

We would like to mention a few hands on examples with some of our solutions to more precisely answer this question:

Our financial crime prevention suite ‘ForensicsCloud’ helps clients prevent financial crime. We monitor millions of transactions per day and our solution uses sophisticated algorithms and AI to reduce the number of fraud signals to be produced. In this way, the manual amount of labour is reduced by a factor of 10.

Also, our MifID II Product Governance solution monitors a client’s investment universe daily and flags all changes relevant to the product governance, allowing the client’s staff to focus on their actual customers.

Q. What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful CEO?

There are many skills needed to be a successful CEO. Most importantly, a vision for a great product in a great market goes a long way and is something a leader can bank upon. Secondly, a leader must be equipped with a set of great work ethics, such as ability to constantly change him- or herself and the organisation in addition to being a savvy salesperson.

Q. Developing solutions for regulations needs the support of high-level talent and dedication. How did you manage to form your dream team?

Initially, we recruited directly from university campuses. Especially, the Managing Director of our Bulgarian operation stood out here in recruiting. Today, however, we take different routes to hire great talent. Besides, our senior leadership plays out by the personal network and chemistry of motivating people to join our team. We’re very proud of our top leadership considering the amount of work they have put to recruit the right talent.

Q. What other CEOs do you look up to? Why?

Elon Musk for being so focused on the market.

Q. If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting, what would it be?

Work hard as much as one can.

Q. What do you think is the most memorable moment in your career?

When we won the pitch for ‘Credit Suisse PRIIP’ in 2017 against ‘SIX Financial Information’!

Florian Clever: A Reliable Leader

Florian Clever serves as the Chief Executive Officer of cleversoft group. Florian studied Business Administration and Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich. Before completing his studies, he founded Dakoko Import & Export in Shanghai and Verinform Systems in the Portland, USA. In 1999, he set up Clever Software Solutions, laying the foundations for today’s cleversoft group, which he has led ever since. Today, Florian is responsible for business development, strategy, and M&A.

“We have established ourselves as a supplier producing legal documents, reporting directly to the financial regulators, and preventing financial crime.”