Tookitaki Appoints Industry Veteran Joe Friscia as Advisor

Tookitaki Holding Pte. Ltd. appointed industry veteran Joe Friscia, former President of NICE Actimize and BAE Systems as Advisor to the Company’s Advisory Board. Joe brings over 25 years’ extensive experience in the financial crime and enterprise software domains having handled roles of global scale. Joe will be helping Tookitaki scale its operations in the U.S., as well as advise around strategic inroads into the company’s Asia-Pacific presence.

Abhishek Chatterjee, CEO and co-founder of Tookitaki shared, “Tookitaki is absolutely delighted to welcome Joe as part of the family. Our vision has always been to revolutionize regulatory compliance and ensure sustainable compliance programs for every financial institution in the world. With Joe at the helm, we are better placed to deliver on this vision by growing our presence significantly across the U.S. and the Asia-Pacific region.”

Tookitaki was founded by Mr Abhishek Chatterjee, its CEO, and Ms Jeeta Bandopadhyay, its COO. Abhishek, who was formerly employed at JP Morgan, observed the 2008 financial crisis first-hand and noted that regulators were stricter about financial checks and balances in a bid to maintain financial stability. Tookitaki was formed from this need to provide sustainable compliance programs in the banking and financial services industry (BFS), using solutions powered by machine learning, Big Data analytics, and distributed data-parallel architecture. The company strives to drive its proprietary technological innovation to help fuel its ongoing fight against money laundering and reconciliation issues.

Ensuring regulatory compliance can be expensive for financial services companies, with the average cost nearly doubled from US$16 million to US$30.9 million between 2011 and 2017 according to a survey. Meanwhile in 2017, over 900 agencies together issued over 200 regulatory updates each day, on average.

“As modern-day criminals thrive with the aid of new and advanced methods of conducting financial crimes, machine learning-based technology is rapidly gaining traction in helping future-proof and thwart these evolving threats.  For this reason, I am both proud and excited to be part of the Tookitaki team and helping them make Sustainable Compliance a reality.” commented Joe Friscia.

With his deep wealth of experience in the financial crime space, Joe’s presence will be invaluable in building business momentum and driving growth for Tookitaki as it looks to expand its offerings around financial crime use cases. He will contribute to Tookitaki’s strength in business and go-to-market strategy to help position Tookitaki as the leading RegTech company that helps banks detect sophisticated money laundering patterns with best-in-class enterprise software solutions.

Joe joins the current board that includes former CEO of online mortgage broker LendingTree, Tom Reddin and ex-Managing Partner of McKinsey & Company, Inc., Shailesh Kekre. With the guidance of strategic advisors, Tookitaki is better positioned to deliver its vision in revolutionizing regulatory compliance and ensure sustainable compliance programs for financial institutions globally.

Tookitaki is a pioneer in launching explainable machine learning models in the compliance space and validating the same with global banks and reputed third-party consultants. It recently filed a patent on explainable AI and machine learning framework and models to bring transparency into the validation process and output interpretability by banking customers and regulators. Tookitaki’s recent Series A round was co-led by Viola Fintech and SIG, followed by Nomura Holdings through its venture capital arm Nomura Incubation Investment Limited Partnership. Other investors include Illuminate Financial, Jungle Ventures and SEEDs Capital, an investment arm of the Singapore government. Its strategic fundraise, complemented with Joe’s appointment, positions the company well to help banking and financial institutions stay “regulator ready”, particularly in the face of rising financial crime complexities.