We’re excited to be leading Melbourne-based FrankieOne’s $20m Series A round! FrankieOne is a unified identity verification platform used by businesses to identify and onboard their end customers.

Rapid digital adoption and identity verification

Regulated entities like financial services companies, telcos, utilities, government agencies and fintechs are all legally required to perform a range of checks before onboarding new customers. These include ID verification (IDV), know-your-customer/business (KYC/KYB), anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud checks.

Gone are the days of turning up to your local post office or bank branch and providing physical documents for witnessing. These old school processes are expensive for the verifying entity and a terrible user experience. As we conduct more and more financial transactions online across a broader range of services -a trend only accelerated by Covid-19- digital identity verification has become critical.

Traditionally, businesses have used multiple vendors for these checks. FrankieOne allows customers to do IDV, KYC, KYB AML and fraud checks along with ongoing transaction monitoring through one unified aggregation platform. In addition to aggregating vendors horizontally, FrankieOne aggregates vertically by using multiple vendors per type of check. This reduces the number of false negatives, meaning that legitimate customers are confirmed at a higher rate without needing a high number of manual checks that’s required if only using one vendor.

We spoke to a number of FrankieOne’s customers and their feedback was universal. Not only did FrankieOne save them from dealing with multiple vendors, it also provided a better service than any individual vendor and, most importantly, it enabled them to qualify and onboard more customers more quickly while simultaneously reducing fraud. By improving their customer conversion rates, FrankieOne turned a pure cost centre into a marketing line item.

We believe that this approach positions FrankieOne to be the world-leading identity verification and fraud risk provider.

The perfect team to do it

We have known Simon Costello for over three years and always wanted to find a way to work with him. He had founded four previous startups across Europe, Asia and Australia, he had a global mindset and insatiable ambition. Simon’s goals are unreasonably big. We want to support teams striving to build iconic companies on the global stage. Simon and his co-founder Aaron are on a mission to do exactly that with FrankieOne.

The company initially started out life as a neobank, but Simon and Aaron quickly faced the pain of customer verification (as a customer), saw a bigger and more global opportunity, and pivoted the company to provide the infrastructure to solve it. Their speed of execution, their willingness to listen to customer feedback and follow demand blew us away. They have a deep understanding of the problem and have experienced it first hand. FrankieOne’s founder-market fit is as clear as its product-market fit.

FrankieOne is growing fast and rapidly expanding offshore. And, if you’re interested in being a part of the next great Aussie fintech, they’re also hiring across the board! 🚀🇦🇺