Financial fraud has risen dramatically in recent years, and it’s not just scammers who are responsible.
Banks are increasingly worried about what have been dubbed “liar loans”, where borrowers submit financial details that are less than truthful, amid pressures from rising interest rates. Fraudulent home loan applications increased three-fold since interest rates began rising in 2022. Then there are issues such as forged documents and signatures.
And that’s where Fortiro, crowned the 2024 Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards′ Startup of the Year last week, steps in.
Fortiro is a fintech specialising in automated document fraud detection and financial verification. It’s used by some of Australia’s most trusted financial institutions, including the National Australia Bank. The platform enables the detection of document fraud as well as the automation of income verification, which then leads to driving faster processing times, reduced costs through fraud avoidance and an improved customer experience.
The startup was founded by former PwC Australia directors Sean Quagliani, David Weber and Amir Vahid, raising $3.5 million in 2022 to scale up their software-as-a-service document fraud and automation product called Protect.
Verification matters because problems such as invoice scams and identity crime cost Australians around $1 billion annually.
The judges selected Fortiro as Startup of the Year amid fellow finalists Goterra, Pathzero and Consultmed, impressed not only by the technology and the problem it solves, but the startup’s growth story, from Blue Chip clients to its use of AI, and growth on all fronts alongside a stable cost base growth.
In the last 12 months, Fortiro has seen annual recurring revenue rise by 230 per cent, with its customer count up 200 per cent. The business is “essentially break-even” .
Staffing has grown by a third to 20, all based in Australia. It’s also developed major partnerships have been established with global software companies including AWS and ABBYY.
It has top 10 ASX clients including NAB, launched new products including Protect Investigator, which uses advanced image forensics to identify document tampering in real time and is now processing documents from North America as part of an early adopter program.
Fortiro now has customers across multiple use cases, from consumer lending (mortgages, credit cards, personal loans – loan application income/doc verification), to payments (AML/CTF/KYC), life insurance claims processing, general insurance claims processing and business lending (asset financing) and is now processing documents from North America as part of an early adopter program.
As well as Fortiro Protect, which automates document fraud checks and eliminates manual reviews, the platform also runs Fortiro Accelerate to instantly extract and verify income and expenses from common financial documents such as payslips and bank statements, and Fortiro Redact, which automatically redacts sensitive information in financial documents.
They’ve also launched Protect Investigator, which uses advanced image forensics to locate where fraudsters have tampered with a document – in real time.
Co-founder and CEO Sean Quagliani said Fortiro now processes thousands of financial documents daily.
“Financial documents are the backbone for many important transactions in our lives, whether it’s an insurance claim, a mortgage, even a degree an education degree,” he said.
“So, being able to trust in financial documents is very very important to ensure that we have a strong financial system and, and that we fight back against the scams and the fraudsters that we’re hearing so much about every day.”
Speaking to Startup Daily at the second annual Best in Tech Awards gala event in Sydney on September 4, Quagliani said winning Startup of the Year was “a testament to the hard work that the team is doing every single day” and the difference it makes for society by eliminating document fraud and friction.
“We wake up every single day and think about how are we going to move our business forward to help our customers and create a new way of doing business for companies that are dealing with documents,” he said.
“Hearing all of the developments in technology really gets me really energised because I know we can change a lot of these industries and traditional ways of working, for the better and for everybody in the ecosystem.”
The Startup of the Year award is supported by the S2S Summit (Startup to Scaleup Summit), from Tank Stream Labs.
See the full list of 2024 Startup Daily Best in Tech Awards winners here.
This article is brought to you by Startup Daily, with thanks to our award sponsor S2S Summit (Startup to Scaleup Summit), from Tank Stream Labs.
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