Australian FinTech company profile #13 – Arctic Intelligence
- Company Name:
Arctic Intelligence
- Website:
- Key Staff & Titles:
We have 17 full-time staff – our management team is Anthony Quinn (CEO), Darren Cade (COO), Imelda Newton (Business Development) and Nathan Zaetta (CTO)
- Location(s):
Sydney, Stone & Chalk
- In one sentence, what does your fintech do?:
Arctic Intelligence is a RegTech business that provides market-leading audit, risk and compliance software in the financial crime risk management area.
- How / why did you start your fintech company?:
Having spent 20 years consulting to investment and retail banks around the world, the last 10 years in financial crime prevention, it really surprised me that sophisticated financial institutions and others were managing financial crime risk assessments on spreadsheets that are inflexible, provide a poor audit trail and are error prone and thought there had to be a smarter way of doing things.
- What the best thing your company has achieved or learnt along the way (this can include awards, capital raising etc)?:
As a relatively small team we have achieved quite a lot but the things we are most proud of include building a suite of financial crime prevention products which are trusted by major corporates but also we have a very diverse mix of clients, from banks, insurance companies, right the way through to local clubs, law firms, accountants and real-estate agents and we are providing them with a cost-effective way to manage their money laundering compliance obligations.
- What’s some advice you’d give to an aspiring start-up?:
It’s a team effort. Starting out as an entrepreneur you are probably equipped with 10% of the skills you need to succeed. The sooner you recognise that and start to think about building out a team of advisors, investors, staff and supporters the more likely you are to fill the skill gaps and build a high performing team that has what it takes to cut through.
- What’s next for your company? And are you looking to expand overseas or stay focussed on Australia?:
We are about to launch our third-platform which is a fully flexible risk assessment platform that is agnostic to risk domain and highly configurable allowing even the most sophisticated business to conduct risk and control assessments in a proportionate way across any risk discipline. We are currently piloting this with several major professional services firms.
Our focus has always been international, in fact our first client was not from Australia, it was from Deloitte in Singapore. Selling financial crime prevention software in Australia 4 years ago was like shouting down a well, as very few firms we came across treated their money laundering obligations seriously and could not see the benefit, so we went overseas but with the events like the $700m fine for the CBA, the Royal Commission into Banking Misconduct, the return of the Financial Action Task Force in November to check-up on Australia’s progress we are experiencing a period of growth that we see continuing.
- What other fintechs or companies do you admire?:
There are so many I admire it’s impossible to name them all but the people that have guts to ‘have a go’ and keep turning up day after day, year after year in the face of often corporate apathy and complacency are the ones I admire the most – persistence beats resistance!
- What’s the most interesting or funniest moment that’s happened in your company’s lifetime?:
Anthony Quinn – CEO: This is more of a personal story, but I came home one night after seeing a social media post for the OzHarvest charities CEO cook-out and said to my wife, you know I wouldn’t mind doing that only to be told, ‘I thinks that’s only for successful CEOs, why don’t you do it when you have kicked a couple of goals’…ouch..!
