​Tell us a little about your organization and why you got into this space?
 
AI Partnerships Corp. (AIP) was formed to create an Affiliate network of early-stage solutions providers in the Artificial Intelligence sector. The founders of AIP saw an opportunity to assist these companies and their enterprise customers, as AI is now being rapidly deployed due to the availability of much lower cost computer resources and software.  These lower cost resources lend themselves to the adoption of AI by all size of organizations. Specifically, we have created a world-wide organization of over 125 Affiliate companies who work together to provide solutions to end-users in various sectors including Fintech.

​Skymantle’s primary goal is to help companies transition to the cloud. We specialize in empowering financial services organizations to meet their regulatory goals through innovative products and solutions.
 
Artin and Raymond have each worked in financial services for over 20 years and we have seen the challenges that financial service companies have transitioning to new technology, let alone the cloud. Many companies would just move their servers to the cloud and call it a day, which isn’t too different from moving to another datacentre. As a result, these firms fail to realize the performance, stability, and cost benefits of next-generation native services and serverless architectures offered by cloud providers. We formed Skymantle to address this challenge, and to accelerate a company’s cloud journey beyond a simple “lift-and-shift”.

​My career has taken me to many parts of the global capital markets industry – both in trading and technology. I am very proud of being part of the success in building a trading and clearing system like Dataphile Software Ltd., now part of Broadridge; Canchek, an anti-money laundering and economic sanctions compliance system; and, Smarten Up Institute, a securities industry education provider.
 
So as a serial entrepreneur I could not pass up the opportunity when Ani Markova and Ingrid Hibbard came to the founders of Canchek a year-and-a-half ago and asked us to find a solution – and did so using Canchek’s software to develop an ESG reporting system.
 
From the beginning, Canchek’s goal has been to provide affordable solutions to small to mid-sized firms in the securities industry that don’t have the need for or resources to implement the high-priced compliance systems designed for larger companies.  
 
With wise counsel from resources industry veterans, Ingrid Hibbard and Mark Thorpe, we recognized that the same kind of approach is needed in the ESG world.
 
The growing investor demand and fast-changing regulatory environment for Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) disclosures places significant financial and administrative burdens on junior and mid-tier companies. We set out to develop an affordable solution that would help these companies aggregate, report, and manage their ESG data, and enable them to meet the information demands of capital providers who are looking to properly assess risks and opportunities.
 
​As the scope of standards and disclosures has grown, so too has our team of talented developers and sustainability professionals.  Our biggest asset is the energy that the team puts into creating a platform for our customers that is simple to use, but robust enough to capture all globally recognized standards and frameworks. It’s very gratifying to see the speed at which we have been able to deliver our solution, now in both English and Spanish, as well as the multiple added features. 

Tell us a little about your organization and why you got into this space
Halo Ai is the first holistic risk and compliance management platform dedicated to helping FinTech companies win. The second leading cause of failure for VC-backed FinTech companies is compliance issues. What it comes down to is that FinTech founders focus on building incredible companies, venture-backed by millions of dollars, and making impactful transformations to how financial services are delivered and utilized. But so many founders don’t account for compliance as part of their strategy. They don't understand it, don’t want to deal with, and have no idea where to start. Feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed, they keep kicking the can down the road, thinking they’ll deal with it “later”. They fail to realize the serious ramifications of operating in a non-compliant fashion. From inability to obtain or renew licensing with Banks and processing partners, to regulatory fines, to business disruption. They then try to fix the problem by throwing people at it. Lots of people. Expensive people. They end up bleeding cash to consultants and others to stay afloat but what they get is largely a temporary fix. And that's what we're solving with Halo Ai. We’re creating an easy solution that FinTech companies can plug into and cut through all of this in a speedy and cost-effective way.
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​   Meet Jennifer Arnold, Co-Founder and CEO of MinervaAI 
   
​   Tell us a little about your organization and why you got into this space?

MinervaAI is a modern deep-learning platform designed to automate real-time client risk assessment. “She’s” created by industry experts and ideal for KYC/onboarding, enhanced due diligence, investigations, and ongoing monitoring for AML/CFT. MinervaAI instantly leverages billions of pieces of open-source data, delivering deeper, more effective risk assessment results.
 
In less than 30 seconds, MinervaAI performs in-depth screening and risk assessment, contemplating over 4.5 billion data points in 55 languages. This wealth of information is automatically processed, collapsed into a manageable list of high-confidence consensus clusters, and assembled into a single audit-proof investigation report

​My co-founder Victor Tay and I have spent over 20 years in the anti-money laundering discipline at some of Canada’s largest banks. We’ve led significant transformational initiatives that included both large scale organizational and process re-design, including defining and implementing the technology components. One of the biggest challenges we encountered was how to effectively address customer risk assessment and enhanced due diligence in a comprehensive, consistent way. Many organizations still use manual processes or out-dated name matching software that creates false-positives and unnecessary work. This leads to operational backlogs and increased cost, not to mention employee burn-out and dissatisfaction. This creates a negative image of the AML units within an organization. They struggle with the reputation that their approach is “holding the team back” putting their company at a competitive dis-advantage. 

Meet Gord Breese, CEO 

Tell us about how your company Katipult is breaking new ground in helping participants in the private capital markets address the complexity & significant costs associated with meeting regulatory compliance obligations?
 
Katipult provides digital infrastructure to standardize the investment workflow and eliminate transaction redundancy, strengthen compliance, remove friction from the investor experience, and accelerate deal flow. As a result, our product can have a tremendous ROI for our customers and allows them to scale their businesses without incurring the expenses of hiring additional staff.   The key outcome we achieve with our customers is to drive more revenue with less resources and to have staff focused on value added work rather than administration. 
 
Companies that are using manual processes and legacy software systems or excel spreadsheets in their processes are being impacted significantly from both soft and hard costs operationally, and potentially putting themselves offside with compliance in the case of an audit by a regulator. 
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