Member Spotlight Halo AI

Meet Dina Ghobrial, Founder and CEO and Nagy Ghobrial, Co-Founder and CTO of Halo AI. ​

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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​Who are your clients and what types of regulatory challenges are they facing?
 
Halo Ai services FinTech companies tackling a variety of financial service verticals and across all stages of growth. Having said that, we like to work with FinTechs during the early stages of their journey in order to get them on the right path from the onset. We support FinTechs offering payments, cards and other lending products, banking services, embedded finance, investing, crypto and more. The common challenge faced by all our customers is the fact they have difficulty connecting the dots across all the different pieces of risk and compliance they need to manage. We help connect the dots by aggregating vast amounts of data and utilizing machine learning algorithms to deliver actionable insights and guided workflows towards a path to compliance at every step.
 
Can you describe your underlying technology and what’s on your product roadmap for the next major planned release?
 
We pull data from a number of key sources, both from our customer and from hundreds of external sources using standard APIs. We analyze the data using our Machine Learning models. We then compare it against acceptable industry standards and regulatory obligations as relevant to each customer’s business. Finally, we put it all together and deliver:

• Halo Scores that quantify risks based on our customer's pre-determined risk appetite and
• Guided workflows that provide a step-by-step roadmap to resolving compliance gaps.
• Risk simulations using predictive modeling.

 
Much like how TurboTax templatized tax filing based on individual or businesses, we’ve templatized compliance taking into account the necessary nuances that differentiate FinTech companies based on the geography they operate in and the services they offer. This may include elements such as local payments vs. cross-border, cards or installments services, whether they’re acting as a Money Service Business or just a conduit relying on other providers to act as MSBs, etc.
 
Future product expansion plans include deepening our ML models, extending our data extraction features, broadening our data set and moving into additional risk domains.
 
Last question, can you share with us why Halo Ai became a member of the Canadian RegTech Association? and do you have any suggestions on how we might enhance our support of RegTech companies?
 
The Canadian RegTech Association is one of the most respected organizations supporting RegTech businesses in Canada. Although Halo Ai is a U.S. based company headquartered in San Francisco, California, we recognize the significant innovation and disruption created by FinTech companies currently sweeping across Canada. We’ve incorporated product support for the Canadian FinTech market which we view as a very important segment for us in North America.