Unit21 Launches Fintech Fraud DAO to Combat Financial Crime With Brex, Chime and PrimeTrust as Early Customers

DAO is expected to process data from 20% of all U.S. fintech customers as part of an effort to help the industry transition from fraud detection to fraud prevention

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Unit21 and other members of the U.S. consumer fintech community have come together to launch the Fintech Fraud Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), a decentralized network that uses a collaborative data-sharing approach to identify and combat fraud.

Participating fintechs include Brex, Chime, PrimeTrust, Yotta and Airbase.

The DAO enables participating organizations to access aggregated user data through an open-source platform, enabling greater transparency and quicker identification of suspicious and potentially fraudulent activity. Traditional AML and KYC systems have not allowed for the sharing of data between organizations at the scale required, making it difficult to share vital information for fraud prevention. Fraud losses have always been a significant cost contributor for financial institutions, more so in the fintech sector where fraud attack vectors are constantly evolving.

For every participant, the Fintech Fraud DAO connects risk and compliance infrastructure to their end users’ data, by allowing participants to privately and securely contribute anonymized transactional behavior. In return, they receive access to cross-platform aggregated data about those customers. Each participating fintech has governing authority over the DAO, through the distribution of governance tokens in the DAO network. The entire system operates purely as a give-to-get model, allowing access to all U.S. fintechs that are willing to contribute end user data in a secure, encrypted format.

By partnering with leading fintechs, the Fintech Fraud DAO is expected to process data from approximately 20% of all U.S. consumer fintech users by the end of the year. Specifically, the DAO currently processes high volumes of data pertaining to:

• Over 20 million neobanking customers;
• Retail end users of spend management platforms with over $3B in annual transaction volumes;
• Customers of some of the world’s leading crypto service providers and exchanges; and
• Greater than a million customers in the consumer lending space.

“As the fintech industry continues to grow, so do the myriad of risks facing industry organizations,” said Clarence Chio, President, Fintech Fraud DAO. “The Fintech Fraud DAO can help create a safer fintech ecosystem by providing a decentralized, network-based datastore that ingests not only fraudulent activity, but also legitimate user behavior across member platforms in real-time, resulting in a safer ecosystem. This is an important step in helping the industry transition from fraud detection to fraud prevention.”

“Brex is excited to partner with the Fintech Fraud DAO. The reason we got involved is so that we can continue supporting our partner organizations and grow our footprint in Fintech, while fraud mitigation is collaboratively managed by the wider community,” said Daniel Sankey, Head of Financial Crimes Compliance at Brex.

“Fraud teams have been stuck comparing their customer information with official resources. Teams solely rely on discrepancies between these sources to serve as a tip off against potential fraud. The DAO provides a platform for risk teams to compare customer information against confirmed fraud, and reduces their need for high frequency decisions that are prone to human error. Over time, there is a ROI through operational time saved, as well as fraud losses,” said Thomas Frantz, Senior Risk manager at Airbase.

Banking veteran Lou Anne Alexander will serve in an advisory role for the DAO. Ms. Alexander has more than 30 years’ experience in the banking industry, leading projects in the e-commerce, payments, identity and authentication space. She most recently served as Chief Product Officer at Early Warning, building out industry-defining solutions to enable payments and mitigate fraud in the banking and financial industry.

“In an ever-evolving industry, standard fraud detection products are not always sufficient to detect fraudulent activity. Fintech Fraud DAO is helping to shape the next generation of fintech innovation by providing an open, yet secure network of collective data to help fintechs further identify and alleviate fraud,” said Lou Anne Alexander. “I look forward to further advising and growing this initiative.”

The DAO is an independent entity governed by its members, allowing participants to collectively decide how the network is operated. All data contributed to the Fintech Fraud DAO is owned by the contributing participant, and is never shared or queried by any member in unencrypted form.

For more information, email [email protected].

About Fintech Fraud DAO

The Fintech Fraud DAO is owned and operated by Unit21, a data infrastructure company at the forefront of the no-code enterprise revolution. Today, the company serves over a hundred fintech organizations for broad use cases around anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud in an integrated Risk and Compliance infrastructure platform.

The Fintech Fraud DAO aims to leverage its extensive network of partner fintechs, as well as deep expertise from building AML and fraud solutions for a variety of fintechs to bring to market a network-driven approach to move the needle on fraud.

Contacts

Amanda Emmer

Rubenstein

[email protected]