Monnai taps explainable AI to build global fintech insight infrastructure

From neo banks, digital payments and remittances to embedded finance and crypto-based transactions, there is an explosion of services targeting digital customers worldwide.

According to a report from Bain, in developing markets like in Southeast Asia, digital financial services could represent up to a $60 billion market by 2025. As these fintechs look to innovate, they will need access to critical infrastructure including effective credit bureaus, alternate data and standardized personal identification data.

“In a digital-first world, every business is a fintech [company]. While these innovations have global scale and applicability, the infrastructure supporting them is fragmented and siloed,” said Pierre Demarche, Monnai’s CEO and cofounder. “To grow, businesses need to leverage and consolidate better technology and data in the same platform, providing a ubiquitous approach to decisioning models.”

According to Demarche, Monnai is already providing insights on more than 3 billion consumers in India, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Today it announced a $3.15 million seed funding round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures with participation from Commerce Ventures, Kearny Jackson and 9Yards Capital.  

Founded just a year ago in 2021 by Demarche and Ravish Patel, Monnai aims to deliver a global infrastructure, connecting disparate data, risk insights and network behavior to power fintech decisioning at scale. Through its API, the company claims to enable fintechs to navigate four key pillars: 

1. Know your customers (KYC); 
2. Trust and fraud risk; 
3. Credit decisioning and; 
4. Collections optimization 

The company claims its platform leverages more than 350 insights aggregated and standardized across ecosystems with identity, digital, communication, device and payments data partners. 

“By using the right data from across the customer lifecycle through multiple sources, fintechs and merchants can create net new business in a way that is also beneficial for the consumers,” said Demarche. 

Bridging the gap between hyper-local and global markets 

“International markets are challenging for fintechs. While there has been an exponential growth of digital data, merging data sources is very complex, disparate and probabilistic, which makes it difficult for them to consume it without spending costly engineering resources and time,” Patel said.

In its first year of operations, Monnai claims that its expertise has led to developing data and aggregation infrastructure across more than 40 countries and currently serves major financial institutions across five markets in Latin America and Asia.  

The company claims that its customers have access to identity and behavior data of more than 5 billion consumers in real-time within a week of deployment. In addition, 85% of users identified are with high confidence due to an increase in approval rates, and have seen a 99% increase in fraudulent identity detection. 

A touch of explainable AI

To deliver fair and transparent fintech decisions, Monnai was built with an explainable artificial intelligence(XAI) component. The XAI model can interpret historic bias, identify features with positive and negative attributions to model behavior, retroactive model comparisons and updates — and continuous model evaluation. The output is then displayed on a simple-to-understand interface, which is designed to make the process seamless for credit analysts, product managers, data scientists and others.

The road ahead for Monnai

Today’s funding news marks the company’s one-year anniversary and follows an initial pre-seed round at the end of 2021 from 500 Global, EMVC and Ginkgo Ventures, which all also participated in this round. The company’s total raised to date amount is now more than $4 million.

Monnai reports that the funding will be used for further development of the platform, new hires and continued global expansion.