Salv is a financial crime prevention and intelligence company in EIC Scaling Club’s Digital Security & Trust group.
Based in Estonia, Salv enables fintechs and financial institutions to share data about questionable transactions in real-time. This, in turn, makes it possible to detect and act on financial crime faster, increasing the chances of recovering stolen assets.
Co-founder Taavi Tamkivi has a background in financial fraud mitigation, stretching back to his experience working at Skype and later at Wise.
At Skype, Tamkivi led the team responsible for combating financial fraud. Later, he joined Wise as the company’s first compliance and anti-money laundering expert. This experience laid the foundation for building out the engine that later became Salv.
The ethos of the company is clear: Preventing financial crime through collaboration. As the majority of financial crime is done through financial institutions, by ensuring that there is communication between those institutions and AML organizations, it’s possible to identify and address possible crime faster.
Salv’s “Bridge” platform does just that – it provides a space for various financial organizations to collaborate with one another. The platform has been active for four years and has brought together over 70 institutions to share data in real-time.
Bridge has most recently addressed the topic of APP (Authorized Push Payment) fraud, which tricks individuals into clicking on A2A (account-to-account) links and authorizing money transfers. This approach is estimated to generate $7.8B in losses by 2028. Using the Bridge platform, Salv has shared that they’ve seen up to 80% more recovered assets.
In addition to the Bridge platform, Salv has launched its Collaborative Scenario Library. The library is a database of anonymized monitoring scenarios, shared with peers to enhance what they call “community crime-fighting”. Through sharing experiences, Salv hopes to empower financial fraud professionals to learn from others’ experiences and therefore increase their capacity to fight financial crime.
Commenting on the Collaborative Scenario Library, Ester Eggert, Head of Product at Salv, has shared:
“Our solution is rooted in a unique collaborative model where users can trust that they are learning from the best practices of their peers. Companies can take scenarios known for generating high true positive rates, tweak them as needed, and then implement them. As a result, they can quickly catch more financial crime.”
Salv was piloted as a prototype in Estonia, where they validated the product and saw immense success from the platform. The platform is built around European and national laws and is fully GDPR compliant.
Now, the platform is used across 13 countries in Europe and the UK.
The platform provides the legal framework for collaboration. Co-founder Tamkivi states that the idea that the law doesn't allow for information sharing is outdated, and that under AML regulations, it is, in fact, considered best practice.
“Every day institutions delay collaboration, more stolen funds vanish. Fighting modern financial crime with outdated communication methods is ineffective. Financial institutions need a faster, smarter way to collaborate. With Salv Bridge, they finally have it.”
To date, Salv has raised over €12 million in funding to bring their financial crime prevention collaboration platform to life. Their most recent funding round was in December 2023, when they raised €3.9 million to enter the UK market.
The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.
The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.
The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.
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