Professionals from the ‘Big Four’ come together to help financial institutions fight money laundering

Financial institutions are at constant risk from abuses of financial crime which includes money laundering, terrorist financing, and other illicit financial transactions. Institutions continuously try to minimize their financial risk and Jocata, a Financial and Technology product and services firm helps them in doing this.

Jocata is a product and services company operating in the areas of Customer Management, Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) compliance for financial institutions world-wide. The startup was formed in 2010 by professional experts with rich experience in top management consultancies (the big four). They are head-quartered in New York with operations in the United States and Hyderabad, India.

Jocata was built on the vision of becoming a premier provider of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) compliance products and advisory services for financial institutions. They assist financial institutions like banks in minimizing compliance risk, operational risk, reputational risk from those of financial crime.

Jocata’s solutions strive to deliver greater compliance levels, productivity and better business intelligence whether deployed in the cloud or in any data center. These services are tailored according to the institution’s products, services and business practices. Prashant adds “we have developed a suite of products ground-up for financial institutions of all sizes to centrally capture and manage KYC information, monitor and report suspicious transactions in a cost-efficient manner, mitigating all of the above-stated challenges and risks.”

Jocata was founded by Prashant Muddu, Andrea Weist and Mahdi Bseiso in late 2010. The founders met in 2006 while working at the New York office of Deloitte and Touche. Andrea and Mahdi remained in New York to manage the US operations for Jocata while Prashant moved to India to set-up the India office and grow the technology team. The Jocata team has grown to 25 members in the last couple of years with several key members moving back from the US to join the company. The diverse cultural backgrounds and professional experience of the founders and key members of the team provide Jocata with valuable insight into the requirements of the customers in different geographic markets.

Jocata is currently focused in providing its solutions in North America, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Asia Pacific (APAC, with a focus on India and neighbouring countries. Prashant is very hopeful for the future that lies ahead, as he rightly mentions “ In the next five years we see ourselves being the premier provider of advisory and technology in the areas of regulatory compliance and risk management.” Jocata currently has a total of 6 clients with 2 of them in the US and the remaining in India (all names cannot be disclosed). Jocata has extensively worked with the National Federation of State Cooperative Banks (NAFSCOB) to set-up a central KYC, AML and CFT framework for the short-term credit cooperative structure in India.

With time more financial institutions realize the importance of maximizing the extent and quality of the customer data captured at the point of establishing the relationship, which inevitably means more customers for the team Jocata to target. It has been challenging for Jocata to sell to enterprises but they're trying to overcome this by partnering with reputed business processing firms and systems integrators in India.

Check them out here and wondering what Jocata means?The name Jocata is part of a scientific name of a bird which ties in with their logo of birds flying in a V. The birds flying in a V signify compliance or adherence to form which is critical for birds flying long distances to reduce risk from fatigue. In case of Jocata, it helps financial institutions reduce risk from non-compliance.