‘We’ve a Pool of Expert Investigators who are all Well-Versed with Various Financial Risks and Crimes’: Elke Biechele, Founder and CEO of RisikoTek Pte Ltd

“AMALIA gives users access to over 300 Million public records, which they can modify and create reports around in a customized fashion.”

RisikoTek Pte Ltd is an investigation software and services company focusing on financial crime detection and related risk mitigation. RisikoTek technology is built by award-winning bankers who are among the leading anti-money laundering experts.

The company was founded in 2018 and is based in Singapore.

Interview Excerpt: Elke Biechele

Explain your services in brief.

RisikoTek, a risk assessment start-up, focuses primarily on financial crime risk. Our services essentially break down into two major chunks—financial threat detection software and investigative consulting.

Our software, AMALIA, provides advanced analytical capabilities to our users. A critical objective we achieved with this software is its user-friendliness. In the current day and age where data is ubiquitous, sound analytics is not. AMALIA expects no data analytics expertise on the part of the user and delivers deep insights every time.

With investigative consulting, we offer our subject matter expertise in the area of financial crime. We have a pool of expert investigators who are all well-versed with various financial risks and crimes. Along with subject matter experts, AMALIA drives high-value research for our clients.

There are other reputed companies in the market, how are you a better service provider?

There are indeed other companies in the market today; however, the rate at which financial crimes are occurring and corporations suffer, there is a gap in the market.

Based on our exhaustive market research, we believe the gap lies in the expectation of technological readiness in the current workforce. All the other solutions on the market today rely on the user to have a deep understanding of technology, if not a computer science degree. At RisikoTek, we are in pursuit of filling this gap.

Since the first planning stage of AMALIA, we have given utmost importance to how users can derive insights from data. The intuitive interface and the capability to write complex rules in plain English put the investigator back into the driving seat without relying on a separate analytics team.

Another major difference between our competitors and us is data access. With the help of our relationships with multiple data providers worldwide, we can procure data on behalf of our clients, giving them a seamless experience, something which is highly unique to RisikoTek.

If any updates and amendments take place in technology, training is given to cope up with those changes. Tell us about your training module for up-skilling employees?

We are fortunate to have certain major international organizations committed to fighting financial crimes, e.g., FATF (Financial Action Task Force), NCA (National Crime Agency, UK), MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore), etc. These organizations generate periodic reports on the latest trends in the FinCrime world. Our employees have easy access to all this content in an internal database; we also encourage lunch-time sharing sessions to expand everyone’s learning.

We also have a cross-training framework in place where employees with a particular skill impart it to interested colleagues.

Currently, we are developing a training course that is updated from multiple sources regularly and can be used by internal teams and people interested to know more about FinCrime.

Data analytics may breach privacy of the customers as their information is visible to their parent companies. How can we protect the interest of the customer in this case?

It’s true that data analytics is becoming more powerful by the day, and there are two main reasons responsible for that—advances in data analysis technology and ease of data collection. Every two days, the world creates data equivalent to all the data collected till 2003.

That said, privacy protection needs to be baked into every aspect of the business, and privacy by design postulates just that. Privacy protection needs to be incorporated in the analytics framework since its design phases, which can be done with the help of acts such as data minimalism, differential privacy, and de-identification.

At RisikoTek, we follow the high degree of client data protection, and any form of personal data is only visible to the user. Our internal analytics report does not include any granular details making it impossible for personal identification.

Does your data analysis tool empower users to retrieve, combine, interact with, explore, and visualize data from any combination of sources?

Yes! AMALIA gives users access to over 300 Million public records, which they can modify and create reports around in a customized fashion. Users also have the option to upload their own data, combine it with other sources if required, and run advanced analytics on them using our proprietary rules engine.

And the best part is, these rules can be written in plain English. Data exploration and visualization can easily be done using the ‘Nexus’ feature, which creates highly interactive networks.

Risk management involves complex calculations in terms of managing risks. Without the automatic tool, each and every calculation regarding risks becomes difficult. How equipped are you to meet the complex risks?

This is one of the key areas covered by AMALIA. Users can efficiently perform complex calculations on large volumes of data or apply pre-set rules already present in the system. These rules are continuously updated to match the latest trends reported by organizations like FATF.

We offer these rules not just as formulas but also with contextual data around them in a library built into the system. Users can easily access this library and use the formulas either directly or customize them with their exact requirements.

Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

Yes. We are currently developing a satellite image recognition platform that will be added to AMALIA. This system is intended to detect illegal wasteland detection to curb pollution. Many satellite image providers are out there, and many are on a mission to use these images to curb both crime and pollution. However, as of now, no player on the market has holistically connected all the dots. We will probably be the first! We are very excited about this.

What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

The future looks promising for RisikoTek. In our on-going research for new markets we have constantly observed an increasing trend for software solution demands for fighting financial crime. There is a surge in demand in Europe and the U.S. and we see companies expanding their compliance and illicit markets research budget YoY. We observed a spike in unscrupulous activities during COVID-19 as well.

These trends highlight there is always going to be a demand pipeline, one just needs to understand the requirements and deliver efficiently on the same.

With the addition of satellite imagery to our analytics platform we provide our clients with a much needed tool in their fight against financial crime

The Leader Upfront

Drawing from her rich experience in the financial industry, Elke Biechele has a close view of how financial crime and money laundering impacts almost every aspect of our lives. Bearing an impressive resume of holding key leadership positions in major global banks, she has worked across geographies deepening her understanding of how financial crimes are enabled at a global scale. Elke founded RisikoTek with an aim to simplify financial crime detection with easy to use cutting edge technology while gaining far deeper insights. Currently, she serves as the CEO of the company.

“With the help of our relationships with multiple data providers worldwide, we can procure data on behalf of our clients, giving them a seamless experience, something which is highly unique to RisikoTek.”