Launching Octia

Rob Reeve, CEO LexTego

After nearly 21 months of work, we are finally ready to release our first product at LexTego, the Octia Platform. The launch of an API driven event monitoring service is the first major milestone to achieve our goal of making it easier and cheaper for Fintechs to deliver the services to detect and monitor financial crime.

This is a key moment for the company, but also a key event in my professional life. I started my journey in the Fintech world in 2007 – bizarrely because somebody went on leave and I was asked to attend a meeting in their absence. 2 years later we delivered O2 Money’s prepaid card, and my role continued in O2’s parent company Telefonica and beyond. Throughout the early stages of my career the focus was always on customer acquisition and onboarding – improving the customer journey being most important. Fast forward 15 years, that requirement still remains true for all Fintechs – whether they are providing a payment service, a loan or crypto exchange.

However, the acquisition of customers sometimes left little space for the implementation of strong operational processes and even less space for the regulatory requirements. For many, fraud and AML controls are seen as business prevention activity that risk impacting growth. We were able to share some of our thoughts on this at this year’s Money 2020

Retrospectively adding controls is complex and requires a detailed understanding of the payment flows and business processes as well as ensuring that all the right data is being captured and correctly interpreted. This means that many organisations only apply the bare minimum service to ensure that they are not facing difficulty with their regulator.

This can leave the operational team feeling frustrated with their ability to really protect the business from malicious actors. The reality is that these departments are unlikely to ever be allocated the budgets they need, especially as we move to a more difficult financial climate.

I had assumed that this was just an issue within the companies delivering financial services from a Telco perspective, but the last 5 years have taught me that this is the situation for every Fintech.

In 2019, Junaid and I discussed how we could create simple services to help address some of these challenges. It became clear that our ambition was far greater; we wanted to tackle an area of Financial Crime that we felt would have a bigger impact on the problems we identified, Transaction and Event Monitoring.

In 2020 we had the opportunity to start implementing our vision. Our first step was to monitor and identify any irregularities in real time with a highly configurable platform – but also run at a lower cost. In the past nine months we have moved that platform so it can be deployed within 15 minutes on to a business’s own cloud domain; and scale to 300 transactions per second. By putting this environment in the hands of our customers, they can have confidence they know exactly where their data is stored and who has access to it.

We have been building our partner ecosystem and it is exciting to see this vision realised in July 2022. For existing Fintechs or people starting their journey we can now offer an API that captures the key events in a customer journey and feeds the relevant data into the platform for assessment. This gives the product team who are focused on building a great core product an easy way to pass the events for assessment.

To find our more about Octia, you can visit our product site – https://lextego.com/octia or contact Junaid Rahim for a demo: hello@lextego.com

I look forward to sharing more exciting developments in the coming months!

Rob