TradeCore automates and scales-up customer risk assessment with Next Matter

We needed to find the sweet spot where we remove the compliance burden for our customers, but still offer a smooth onboarding experience for their users. Next Matter enabled that for us.

Mihajlo Miklos, Head of BD & Partnerships at TradeCore

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TradeCore is a high-growth fintech company that offers an API-first, regulated, fintech development platform to other fast-growing fintech businesses. TradeCore’s customers benefit from a fully-licensed infrastructure to meet regulatory requirements, faster go-to-market, and outstanding customer experience. 

Managing compliance and risk in financial services is a challenging endeavor. TradeCore operates in multiple jurisdictions with different regulatory requirements, and their business customers and end users expect high-performing technologies with near-instantaneous onboarding experience and low friction. The TradeCore Platform must maintain a fine balance between strict compliance and transparency on the one hand, and convenience and efficiency on the other. 

“Our customers are fintech businesses whose core competencies are product, marketing, and tech – not compliance or risk management,” said Mihajlo Miklos, Head of Business Development and Partnerships. “As a provider of regulated services, TradeCore had a number of problems to solve when it came to ensuring that our customers can offer compliant products without worrying about compliance or risk management themselves”.

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THE CHALLENGE

Onboarding customers in a compliant and scalable way – without the manual overhead 

We knew that compliance operations would eventually become a constraint with customer growth. Automating the manual parts of our risk assessment process would be critical for customer satisfaction.

Mihajlo Miklos, Head of BD & Partnerships at TradeCore

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TradeCore’s ability to grow – and also enable their customers to grow – is contingent on their capacity to onboard new users in a highly-efficient and compliant way.

Miklos summarizes: “How do we ensure regulatory compliance for multiple jurisdictions while being careful to avoid making errors, and – on top of that – offer a real-time risk-scoring and onboarding experience that exceeds the expectations of our customers’ users?

Early in the development of TradeCore’s platform, they invested heavily in understanding compliance and risk across jurisdictions, to ensure the platform was both fully compliant and simple-to-use for customers with end users all over the world. TradeCore manages KYC and Onboarding for their customers as  part of their overall Compliance Engine. At the center of that process is a proprietary risk calculator, where each new user TradeCore onboards for their customers is scored and assigned a risk category in real-time before completing the onboarding.

“Risk scoring is a planned assessment that is an integral part of maintaining regulatory compliance,” said Dragan Maksimovic, Compliance Officer at TradeCore, and a fintech industry veteran with over 10 years of experience in risk management. “It’s part of a comprehensive onboarding that meets regulatory requirements and forms the basis of customer due diligence/KYC.

‍The problem was that the internal process for assigning risk scores had to be done manually – for each new user of the platform. There was a missing layer of automation between TradeCore’s platform, the risk engine, and the compliance operations team overseeing the onboarding process. That manual operations requirement would become a major throughput issue if TradeCore (or their customers) continued to grow. 

“We knew all along that risk and compliance operations would become a constraint with customer growth. Automating the manual steps of our risk assessment process was critical for customer success,” said Miklos. “Helping our customers grow is as important to us as attracting new customers.”

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THE SOLUTION

Speeding up onboarding and increasing throughput with process automation

We were able to get it up and running in no time, with no engineering commitment from our side.

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TradeCore needed a tool that could automate the flow of user onboarding data to the risk calculation engine, return a risk score, and assign a risk category to a user. The ball moved quickly from discovery to solutioning almost as soon as they discovered Next Matter.

“The good thing about Next Matter was that they could articulate a solution to our problem with very little effort,” said Miklos. “We were able to get it up and running in no time, with no engineering commitment from our side. Next Matter’s API access was a must-have for us, and we were very impressed with the platform’s simplicity of use.

Using Next Matter, Dragan Maksimovic and his compliance team were able to stop worrying about the repetitive component of risk scoring. For every new user on TradeCore’s platform, the risk scoring process was now carried out automatically, with virtually no manual coordination. Whereas before each user needed to be entered into the risk calculator manual with a simple copy-paste, now user inputs were mapped directly to the risk calculation fields, and the risk category assigned automatically.

For Maksimovic, “Next Matter is a very convenient tool to complete daily operations work. The automation is quite modular and flexible too.”

RESULTS

Faster onboarding unlocks growth and customer satisfaction
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We have a lot of users to onboard and it was a very time-consuming process. With Next Matter we reduced the onboarding time by 5-6x.

Dragan Maksimovic, Compliance Officer at TradeCore
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Since implementing Next Matter, TradeCore has been able to continue acquiring customers, and allow their existing customers to grow uninhibited, while still providing a seamless and  compliant customer onboarding experience. 

“We saw our customers grow immensely and knew that meant more end users needed to be onboarded and risk assessed. Operational throughput would have been a significant bottleneck, but Next Matter increased risk scoring efficiency by a factor 5 or 6x almost overnight,” said Maksimovic. “We could also perform more advanced filtering of our customer risk data, and manual error was almost completely eliminated.”  The change came just in the nick of time, just ahead of a large surge of new users on TradeCore’s platform, which resulted in no disruption to the company’s already outstanding onboarding customer experience.

“To compare it, versus a High Street bank, you’ll expect 2-3 days to onboard,” explains Mikos. “TradeCore tries to make this as real-time as possible. With Next Matter, we’re able to guarantee that performance regardless of the total number of users we have to onboard.”  

One of the biggest benefits of Next Matter for TradeCore was the speed of implementation and optimization. With little more than the business requirements for the risk scoring use case, the process was able to be built, integrated, and implemented within a business day. Any process steps, fields, default values, or other inputs that need to be modified along the way can be taken care of by the TradeCore compliance operations team directly – no need for a ticket to IT or a support request to Next Matter. 

What’s next for TradeCore? For now, Maksimovic plans to allocate the saved time and resources to strategic planning and refining other compliance processes. He and his team will devote more time toward anticipating regulatory changes and how those might impact customers, as well as looking into automation for further compliance and reporting processes.