Effectiv raises $4m from Accel for fraud and risk management platform

By Edlyn Cardoza

FinTech startup Effectiv recently announced a $4 million seed funding round, led by Accel with participation from REV (funded by RELX) and other industry leaders.

Effectiv offers a next-generation, no-code risk management platform for mid-sized banks, credit unions, FinTechs and financial institutions. With cutting-edge AI and an intuitive user interface, Effectiv’s solutions enable rapid adaptation to new trends and aim to reduce the cost to manage fraud and risk significantly.

Banking and financial institutions have rapidly digitised all their channels, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, fraudulent activity has kept pace, too, with fraud losses pegged at $19 billion in 2020. Additionally, newer offerings like buy-now-pay-later and peer-to-peer lending have gained significant momentum, adding additional complexity to fraud and risk patterns. In this rapidly evolving world, static strategies can’t safeguard for long. 

Effectiv’s founding team were all early team members at Simility, an enterprise fraud prevention company that PayPal acquired in 2018. At Simility and PayPal, they had worked on building solutions for organisations like US Bank, Discover, Synchrony and millions of PayPal merchants. With over four decades of combined experience building fraud and risk mitigation systems, the team started working on Effectiv after they realised that the technologies they have been building so far were often out of reach to smaller financial institutions.

“Dialogues with industry experts from banks, credit unions, combined with our team’s decades of experience in this space, helped us validate the gap that we saw in the market,” says Ravi Sandepudi, co-founder and CEO of Effectiv. “Cutting-edge technologies that drive Effectiv have so far been prohibitively expensive and were designed for and by large organisations. Effectiv aims to change that and truly democratise AI-driven risk management, making it accessible to any financial institution. Every organisation, regardless of size, should have access to best in class safety measures to protect their members and customers.”

Ritesh Arora, Co-founder and President at Effectiv, added: “We are building a platform that is designed from the ground up to be extremely easy to integrate and implement. Effectiv comes integrated with best in class data services and our proprietary AI decides when to optimally use (and pay for) a data signal. Our goal is to help teams manage their risk strategies without relying on developers.”

“As the world is on a digitisation spree, we know that challenging times are ahead for financial institutions. We see tremendous value in Effectiv’s innovative approach to fraud and risk management. Their powerful yet rapidly adaptable AI platform could be the key to identifying these changing trends. We are looking forward to working with the Effectiv team in making these world class solutions accessible to every financial institution.” says Dinesh Katiyar, Partner at Accel

“We were attracted to the pedigree of Effectiv’s founding team and their decades of experience tackling fraud at some of the world’s largest organisations. As one of the earliest investors at Palantir and with an affiliation to LexisNexis, we are passionate about fraud and risk mitigation and we see Effectiv spearheading a dramatic evolution in this space,” says Kevin Brown Founder Partner at REV.

Effectiv intends to use the funds for technology development, growing the team in the US, and marketing. Effectiv onboarded its first customer in June 2021 and has already processed over $1 billion in loan volume. After a successful closed beta, the platform is live, and the team is actively onboarding new customers. The company has also brought on board industry veterans Bob Stock as an advisor and Mike Persichini as Head of Sales to kick start its growth in the US.