EyesClear is joining NCE Finance Innovation and we had a chat with Per Sviggum, the co-founder, to learn more about what they do and their journey as a RegTech startup based in the UK.
London-based startup, EyesClear, joins NCE Finance Innovation
26. May, 2020
What does EyesClear do?
EyesClear gives banks a crystal clear and real-time view of payments and trade transactions coming in and going out of the bank. It provides compliance managers with a forensics tool to perform a detailed analysis of clients’ transactions together with versatile reporting and alerting capability. For business units such as foreign exchange and trade finance, EyesClear is the ultimate scouting tool for new clients and new businesses. With built-in features as well as extensive user customisation capability, compliance or business units can easily find out anything from suspicious transactions to missed FX opportunities.
EyesClear is based out of Level39 in London, can you tell us a bit about your experience operating in the UK market compared to the Norwegian market?
The Norwegian market is a new market for us, and we are just starting to make inroads. The UK and Norwegian markets are similar in that the banks are facing similar challenges both on the business front as well as the regulatory front. Therefore we expect our product to be as relevant in Norway as it is in the UK. With the uncertainty UK banks are facing due to Brexit together with Norway’s clear head start on digitalisation, we already see a solid interest from Norwegian banks to our product.
What are your ambitions in the Norwegian market and international market?
As we have only recently started covering Norway, we are still distilling the feedback from clients to add desired features to our product. That not only enhances the value provided to Norwegian customers, but it also makes EyesClear more relevant for global customers as market-specific features are built in. Using Norway as a springboard to the European market, we aim to turn EyesClear into a product that a small regional bank, as well as a global giant, can use.
Can you share something exciting you’re currently working on with us?
We recently introduced online versatile reporting capabilities into EyesClear. With that, we brought together the speed of in-memory processing and the convenience of asking complex questions. We are very excited to see the overwhelming interest from our clients, and we already started planning to make the feature stronger through introducing additional AI/ML capabilities into it. Our users are now able to hand over mundane reporting and monitoring tasks to EyesClear and focus more on strategic tasks.
What do you think will be valuable in the industry going forward?
In our view, one of the core trends of the ’20s will be a further proliferation of SaaS products coupled with AI/ML, especially in banking. The financial industry has generally been much more conservative in using third party products and has only recently started to switch to cloud services. Currently, EyesClear is offered as an on-premise as well as a cloud solution. But in future, the uptake of cloud services will allow SaaS companies like EyesClear to integrate into banks more easily. Besides, from an AI/ML perspective, it will be more productive and less biased if financial institutions used AI/ML capability trained on general data rather than their data. That further supports procuring services from specialised SaaS companies like EyesClear with in-depth domain knowledge.
How can Eyesclear contribute to the cluster community?
EyesClear is based in the UK’s leading fintech hub, Level39 in London’s Canary Wharf, where several fintech unicorns have taken root in recent years. London has been the starting point for many such companies, that first expand into Europe, and then become global players afterwards. As such, EyesClear can be a bridge for the cluster community to tap this excellent resource in London in addition to sharing its experience, not only from the UK, but also other markets we engage with.
What is your motivation for joining NCE Finance Innovation?
We have been fortunate to be part of the Level39 community where we have gained tremendous insight into growing EyesClear by talking to other startups in the community as well as representatives of large companies. Therefore, we feel there is tremendous value for us in joining the NCE Finance Innovation cluster and connecting with other cluster members in our quest to expand in the Norwegian market.
