Page 14 - bne_Tech_12_2019

Investment
December 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 14
Estonian anti-money- laundering startup Salv secures seed funding
The Estonian start-up Salv, which targets money laundering, has raised $2mn (€1.8mn), the company said.
FlyVentures, Passion Capital, and Seedcamp provided the bulk of the financing, with
a number of angel investors also chipping in. Salv, which was founded by former employees
of TransferWise and Skype – both worldwide- renowned tech companies that also originated in Estonia – offers solutions to banks to help fight financial crime.
The ambition should resonate well in Estonia and in the Baltic region, where a number of banks, such as the big Scandinavian brands Swedbank and Danske Bank, have been embroiled in money laundering scandals. Both Swedbank and Danske Bank are facing investigations for unaccounted money flows through their Estonian branches.
Another Baltic state, Latvia, is also striving to improve its reputation as an entry point into the EU for dirty money from the east, Russia in particular.
“The idea, says co-founder and CEO [of Salv] Taavi Tamkivi, is to move [anti-money laundering measures] beyond just compliance to something more proactive that actually does defeat crime,” Tech Crunch reported.
“Today, between $1 trillion to $2 trillion a year is still laundered. The excessive regulations mean that nearly all of a bank’s compliance team’s effort goes into compliance. They have very little energy left to actually focus on improving their financial crime-fighting abilities. The software they’re using is similar, focused almost wholly on compliance, not crime-fighting,” Tamkivi told Tech Crunch.
Foreign investors drive Romania’s IT industry
Foreign owned companies generate three quarters of the revenues in Romania’s IT industry and drive the market up based on rising exports that account for 80% of the industry’s turnover, according to the latest statistics published by
the industry association. The local investors and market are, in contrast, stagnating and the tight labour market helping foreign companies retain the best employees might explain this.
The Employers' Association in the Software and Services Industry (ANIS) forecasts Romania’s IT
market will keep expanding by around €500mn per year, to reach €7.3bn in 2022.
The combined growth over the next two years will thus measure 25%, up from an estimated €5.9bn this year.
At the same time, the number of employees in the industry is steadily increasing, by an average of 10% per year. It is unclear whether this growth rate can be maintained in the future in the context of the tight labour market.