Highlights:

  • A report from Bain says that by 2025, digital financial services could be worth as much as USD 60 billion in developing markets like Southeast Asia.

From neo banks to digital payments and remittances to embedded finance and transactions based on cryptocurrencies, the number of services for digital customers worldwide is multiplying.

A report from Bain says that by 2025, digital financial services could be worth as much as USD 60 billion in developing markets like Southeast Asia. As these fintechs try to create new ideas, they will need access to critical infrastructures, such as good credit bureaus, alternative data, and standardized personal identification data.

Monnai’s CEO and cofounder Pierre Demarche said, “In a digital-first world, every business is a fintech [company]. While these innovations have global scale and applicability, the infrastructure supporting them is fragmented and siloed. To grow, businesses need to leverage and consolidate better technology and data in the same platform, providing a ubiquitous approach to decisioning models.”

Demarche says that Monnai is already offering information on more than three billion people in India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. The firm announced that it had raised USD 3.15 million in a seed funding round. Better Tomorrow Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Kearny Jackson, and 9Yards Capital participated in this round.

Started in 2021, Monnai aims to create a global infrastructure that connects different types of data, risk insights, and network behavior to make fintech decisions on a large scale. The company says that its API will help fintechs navigate four key pillars:

  • Know your customers (KYC).
  • Trust and fraud risk
  • Decisions about credit and,
  • Optimization of collections

The company says that its platform uses more than 350 insights from identity, digital, communication, device, and payment data partners that have been gathered and standardized across ecosystems.

Demarche said, “By using the right data from across the customer lifecycle through multiple sources, fintechs and merchants can create net new business in a way that is also beneficial for the consumers.”

Bringing hyper-local and global markets together

Patel stated, “International markets are challenging for fintechs. While there has been an exponential growth of digital data, merging data sources is very complex, disparate, and probabilistic, which makes it difficult for them to consume it without spending costly engineering resources and time.”

Monnai acknowledges that during its first year of operations, its expertise had helped it build data and aggregation infrastructure in more than 40 countries. It works with major financial institutions in five Latin American and Asian markets.

The company says that within a week of deployment, its customers can access identity and behavior data of more than five billion consumers in real-time. Also, 85% of identified users have high confidence because approval rates have gone up, and there has been a 99% rise in fraudulent identity detection.

A bit of explainable AI

Monnai was built with an Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) component so that it could make fair and transparent decisions about fintech. The XAI model can decipher past events, find features that have positive and negative effects on model behavior, compare and update historical models, and evaluate models continuously. The results are then shown on an interface that is easy to understand and makes the process easy for credit analysts, product managers, data scientists, and others.

Monnai’s way forward

Today’s funding news comes close to the firm’s one-year anniversary and initial pre-seed funding by 500 Global, EMVC, and Ginkgo Ventures, who participated in the pre-seed round at the end of 2021. The company has so far raised more than USD 4 million.

Monnai says that the money will be used to expand the platform, hire more people, and keep growing worldwide.