Battling ‘criminal entrepreneurs’

In fact, they are working in groups, often with a veneer of respectability to constantly try and find weaknesses in the way institutions share data so they can take advantage. Over a 20-year career working in the financial sector, Diana Downing, founder and chief executive for financial technology company Transaction 360˚, based in Appleby, has realised that understanding who you are doing business with has never been more important to companies. Now the start-up - which she began in 2019 - is working with a major financial institution to keep online fraudsters at bay.
“Fraudsters are the entrepreneurs of the criminal fraternity,” says Diana.
“They identify gaps in the market, devise compelling solutions and deploy them within days.
“They are not fettered by legislation, budgets or bureaucracy. As a result, law enforcement are left several steps behind and the fraudsters have cashed out and moved on by the time they catch up. The solution to the problem lies in cleansing, understanding and analysing the data at a granular level. This reveals linkages and relationships that were previously unknown, but can make a huge difference in who businesses want to do business with.”
Before beginning T360˚ Diana held several executive positions in the banking sector and was a member of the regional management team at J.P. Morgan.  In 2011 she also founded BankCheck by Lacuna Solutions, a data platform which enables banks, financial institutions and government agencies to carry out global payments securely and efficiently. Specifically, BankCheck was able to analyse data to verify legal entities taking part in a transaction.
T360˚ took the same concept but enhanced it by revamping the underlying technology and emphasising flexibility, speed and efficiency.
It is able to securely identify legal entities as well as data within particular transactions.
The service can spot patterns in the data to identify potential fraud, as well as to screen clients for any suspicious activity and carry out onboarding processes to securely sign them up to a financial services platform.
“Our data as a service platform seeks to address the issue of fraud,” says Diana.
“Fraud is increasing at a rapid pace because the current technology solutions are not adequate for the digital transformation that is under way across financial services.
“It is essential for regulated organisations to know exactly which entity they are trying to onboard or to monitor, but often this doesn’t happen or is hard to achieve. Bad actors have been able to defraud organisations by taking advantage of current technology and data limitations.”
Diana says the growing importance of artificial intelligence has, in many cases, been a gift to fraudsters.
“Whilst it can clearly be used as a force for good, it also has more sinister applications,” she says.
“Fraudsters exploit weaknesses and poor governance structures in attempting to defend against fraudsters utilising AI. We combine a state-of-the-art machine learning and AI approach with a highly trained team of business analysts that interact across a secure network of users. This ‘data treatment’ process continuously improves the inherent quality of data. We also provide data lineage on critical data, so that we maintain a record of each time someone updates data, creating an audit trail.”
The company uses its All-Linked Information Connect Exchange channel (ALICE) to securely exchange messages with clients seeking to verify particular information about a company or a party to a transaction.
“We verify the data entering our data environment, and then check and cross reference it with other data sources before we rely upon it and allow our customers to trust it,” says Diana.
“This feature, in addition to our AI-supported environment which continuously updates ‘fingerprinted’ data fields, makes our solution unique.”
T360˚ signed its first contract with a major wealth management technology client in March last year and signed a second contract with this initial client in October.
“We are currently in negotiations to extend these contracts as well as to expand our business with this client,” says Diana.
The company relocated to Appleby from London in August 2021. Diana, who is originally from Lytham St Annes, says she chose the location because of the quality of life on offer, as well as the “levelling up” opportunity and the potential for a financial technology company to provide growth and investment opportunities in the area. It currently has a small core team of 12 data analysts, front-end analysts and back-end developers, with the majority working remotely outside of Cumbria.
“Our biggest challenge is finding good, quality technology hires,” says Diana.
“In addition, as a start-up company, it is notoriously difficult to bring in equity investment in the current uncertain economic environment.”
In the past year T360˚ has been developing the first phase of its Delivering the Data Standard solution, a £247,000 project, which received a £50,000 Innovating for Success grant from Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership.
Diana says the project has enabled it to develop a service which financial companies can use to deliver accurate, continuously updated data and to safely screen for anti-money-laundering risks. The company is in the final stages of delivering proof of concept for the Delivering the Data Standard for a major financial institution.
“We are also in discussions with another client in the fund management area and we are developing a proof of concept for a global company in the financial institutions area,” says Diana.
The company is also in the early stages of agreeing a training programme with Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, in Penrith, focused on sixth form students.
“We are looking to expand our technical and data analysis teams by training local students in data management,” says Diana.