Hummingbird Raises $3 Million to Modernize Anti-Money Laundering
With funding from Homebrew, Omidyar Network, TTV Capital, and Designer Fund, the company continues its mission to fight financial crime
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Hummingbird, the modern platform for anti-money laundering (AML), announced that it has raised $3 million in a funding round led by Homebrew, with investments from Omidyar Network, TTV Capital, and Designer Fund. Hummingbird brings agility, intelligence, and breadth to the AML practice for banks, payments companies, and other financial institutions. Many of these institutions struggle to keep up with increasing complexity in AML, and investigators are swamped with cumbersome workflows, strict timelines, and scattered data. Hummingbird uses machine learning and provides deep investigative capabilities, enabling investigators to focus on fighting financial crime.
"US institutions are spending an estimated $25 billion per year on AML, but they're battling dated technology stacks and manually coordinating detailed workflows," said Joe Robinson, co-CEO and co-founder of Hummingbird. "Hummingbird's technology and algorithms can assist AML experts with complex investigations and help these institutions stay on top of new money laundering methods."
The Problem:
- $2 trillion is laundered every year and less than 1% is caught. The United Nations estimates that illegal activities fuel 2–5 percent of the global GDP in money laundering every year. Profits from political corruption, bribery, organized crime, human trafficking, and illegal trading all end up being laundered through the financial system. Financial institutions invest billions in AML programs, but tech-savvy criminals are tough to catch.
- $321 billion in fines for regulator failings since 2008. Financial institutions pay massive fines for failing to comply with regulations. Proper compliance is complex, and mistakes are expensive. And it isn't just the banks that pay: the cost for innocent victims far outweighs the financial costs.
- Crimes that rely on money laundering are on the rise. New financial technologies like cryptocurrencies make it harder than ever for financial institutions to keep up with AML.
"The same technologies that are transforming finance will fundamentally transform regulation, and Hummingbird is at the forefront of that change," said Kabir Kumar, head of Policy and Ecosystem building at Omidyar Network. "Adding intelligence to the compliance process and making it easier for investigators and law enforcement to follow the money is at the heart of Hummingbird's vision—one that can have a real impact in curbing financing of terrorism, human trafficking, and making the financial system safe for all of us."
Hummingbird's founders have top-tier experience that is balanced between the regulation and the technology sides of the industry. Joe Robinson, along with Jesse Reiss and Ryan Gerard, have backgrounds that include product leadership at Square, while Matt Van Buskirk and Jo Ann Barefoot are former regulators and prominent compliance experts. The company has offices in both San Francisco and Washington, D.C.
"The Hummingbird team brings together a unique blend of regulatory and technology expertise," said Satya Patel, partner at Homebrew. "They've built an elegant solution to a very complex problem, and have the industry knowledge to lead the modernization of the anti-money laundering practice area."
Value Proposition
Hummingbird is a modern take on AML case management and investigation. It's the only platform that enables customers to get started without an integration. Hummingbird was intentionally designed to support compliance teams that don't have easy access to engineering or IT resources.
- Easy Deployment: Getting started with Hummingbird is radically different from existing solutions. Setting up a Hummingbird account takes a minute or two, and Hummingbird can easily be deployed in parallel to existing case management workflows.
- No Integration Required: Hummingbird has modern, easy-to-use APIs for transferring data to and from the platform, but integration is not required to get started. Case information from spreadsheets, documents, and web searches can simply be imported through the Hummingbird interface.
- Intelligent Platform: Hummingbird adds insights about investigation subjects and provides capabilities like interactive pattern visualization, automatic location intelligence, time-sequence narratives of customer behaviors, and relationship mapping between investigation subjects.
- Collaboration: Built-in collaboration tools eliminate the need for cumbersome, insecure case file sharing and tracking. The platform also supports partner networks, like banks and their FinTech partners, that often struggle with information-sharing.
- Data Science Ready: Hummingbird provides a foundation for data science and machine learning while ensuring transparency in the investigation process.
- Easy to Use: Hummingbird has been thoughtfully designed with the needs of AML professionals in mind. The platform is intuitive and doesn't require training to use.
Hummingbird's platform is available for banks, payment companies, cryptocurrency companies, lenders, marketplaces, and other financial services providers. The technology is already available in the United States, and pilots will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis in other countries.
About Hummingbird
Hummingbird is designed to enhance anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing investigations. It reduces cumbersome paperwork, provides insightful analytics, and enables collaboration for compliance professionals and law enforcement agents. We're on a mission to turn the tables against criminals who pollute our financial system. Modern criminals are sophisticated, tech-savvy, and agile. The tools used to fight financial crimes should be, too. To learn more, please visit hummingbird.co or follow on Twitter @HummingbirdFin and Facebook @HummingbirdRegtech.
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