Australian FinTech company profile #140 – AssuranceLab
1. Company Name: AssuranceLab
2. Website: www.assurancelab.com.au
3. Key Staff & Titles: Paul Wenham (Co-Founder & CEO), Erika Villanueva (Co-Founder & CCO)
4. Location(s): Sydney, Australia. Serving clients in Australia, New Zealand, the US, UK, Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong India, The Philippines and Vietnam.
5. In one sentence, what does your fintech do?: AssuranceLab make information security compliance easy, eg. Consumer Data Right accreditation and SOC 2 reports.
6. How / why did you start your fintech company?: Traditional audit firms serve the top 1%. Those audits are unaffordable, confusing and cause major business disruptions. The remaining 99% like Fintech’s, need to get accredited for Open Banking, or grow internationally with standards like SOC 2 to satisfy large customers and regulators. We built a Regtech solution that allows clients to self-navigate audits, reducing the costs, complexity and business disruption. We do iterative audits at our clients pace and issue the assurance reports to offfer the complete solutions, leveraging our tech.
7. What is the best thing your company has achieved or learnt along the way (this can include awards, capital raising etc)?: A recent highlight is setting the record timeline for an open banking accreditation audit – from kick-off call to submitting the ACCC application in 4 weeks. It was a game-changing experience working with the client and our three partners. That achievement and the lessons learned play a major role in accreditations becoming easier, faster and more affordable. We’ll be sharing more about that in a webinar in October. Watch this space.
8. What’s some advice you’d give to an aspiring start-up?: It’s all about the customer. If you truly understand what they want/need and relentlessly iterative and improve the way you provide that to them, then you will succeed.
9. What’s next for your company? And are you looking to expand overseas or stay focussed on Australia?: Our focus is contunuing to build partnerships. Our auditor independence makes us a natural fit for products and services that combine with audits to solve customers needs for trust. We’re also making inroads into the environmental, social, governance (ESG) areas of audits and trust, which is an exciting new area of great importance around the globe.
10. What other fintechs or companies do you admire?: Sempo. Their blockchain product delivers aid into developing nations to reduce fraud, and save those people from waiting months for funds they desperately need. We worked with them on their SOC 2 to overcome global regulatory barriers. It was a delight to support them and their partners like Oxfam in the amazing work they do.
11. What’s the most interesting or funniest moment that’s happened in your company’s lifetime?: We were about to issue our first report for Open Banking accreditation. At the 11th hour we realised that being a qualified CA was not enough, we had to become a Certified Public Practice firm (who knew, even after over a decade of combined experience in Big4 practice!). All panic aside, it was ironic to experience first hand the pain our clients go through trying to navigate compliance. After many calls with CA-ANZ, scrambling to meet the req’s and working with the client on plans B, C, through to Z, to meet their urgent timeline, we became a CPP and got the report issued on time! They’re now accredited by the ACCC 🙂
