iComply Investor Services Inc. offers compliance software for decentralized financial markets. Their proprietary technology enables more efficient workflows in private and public capital markets through secure record keeping, reporting and transaction monitoring.
Getting started
With education and deep experience in finance and enterprise technology, the founders of iComply saw an opportunity to use blockchain technology to automate the creation of certified true and original digital share certificates. After a SEC report on July 25, 2017 establishing cryptocurrencies as securities, the founders seized the opportunity to launch a tool surrounding compliance in the emerging market. Specifically, the founders sought to release the world’s first-to-market protocol that would facilitate governance over the live trading of blockchain tokens and coins, while observing international security regulations.
This critical layer of compliance has been called the ‘last bastion’ for institutional and public investment to enter blockchain and cryptocurrency markets, which represents a $160 trillion opportunity. As one iComply founder stated, “if TurboTax can digitize the Income Tax Act, why can’t we digitize the Securities Act?”
Growing the decentralized market
iComply’s founders believe today, capital markets are broken. Private equity transactions frequently take months between the date of purchase and the time the investor will see their assets come through their account. Public markets continue to see less IPOs, while costs for compliance increase. Transactions still take a minimum of 2 days to complete.
The team is working to tackle the inefficiencies of today’s capital markets. Using iComply’s blockchain agnostic processing architecture, transactions and approvals that once took months can completed in as little as 27 seconds. This offers massive disruption and liquidity opportunities to capital markets issuers and investors.
Key accomplishments
iComply is very proud of the team they have built. Given the short amount of time since incorporation, the team’s efforts have outpaced market competitors. In a short amount of time they have closed their seed round and become international leaders in their field: no other comparable solution yet exists on the market. The team is also very proud of hitting their revenue targets throughout the year. iComply passed six figures within 30 days of their first product release.
Challenges and opportunities
The biggest challenge iComply faces today is finding the right talent to scale the business as demand and interest continues to grow. Due to the sensitive nature of the technology the team only hires senior developers. This means they must consistently compete with firms like Facebook, Amazon, SAP, the BC Government and SoftBank to attract top tier talent.
Reason for competing
Winning the NBVC competition would bolster the trust the team has built between key local and international stakeholders. Being awarded would also help put BC regtech and fintech companies like iComply more on the map, establishing them as instrumental players in the global market.
Five-year outlook
iComply aims to bridge the gap between traditional and decentralized financial markets. In five years, they hope to see this gap shortened with their technology acting as a central tool to streamline compliance processes both on and off the blockchain, leaving a lasting global footprint.
About iComply Investor Services Inc.
iComply Investor Services Inc. (iComply) is a leading global RegTech platform for digital finance and cryptocurrencies that provides turnkey compliance automation, simplifying the multi- jurisdictional requirements of non-face-to-face transactions. The technology leverages blockchain and artificial intelligence for robust, secure, and immutable record keeping, reporting, and transaction monitoring, and is capable of interacting beyond blockchain; it can be used by traditional and decentralized companies alike.
iComply has released two products, both adding critical pieces of compliance infrastructure: iComplyICO and iComplyKYC. iComplyICO uses iComply’s proprietary PrefactoTM technology which enables compliance and governance for the secondary trading of tokens on open and public blockchains and is technology agnostic—meaning that new blockchains, mesh networks, or centralized trading systems can be integrated securely.
iComplyKYC is an industry leading KYC, AML and risk solution for decentralized finance and cryptocurrency applications. An integrated ecosystem, iComply’s technology enables an efficient workflow and record keeping between investors, regulators, securities issuers, and capital markets service providers. Learn more: iComplyICO.com
iComply team
Matthew Unger, CEO & Founder
Matthew Unger found early success in his career, becoming one of the youngest executive financial advisors in Investors Group Financial Services’ history. At the age of 22 he built a $42 million business in under 5 years. Following his tenure in financial services, Matthew moved into enterprise technology and innovation management. In 2016 he studied emerging technologies including blockchain, artificial intelligence and quantum computing at MIT.
Qayyum Rajan, Chief Data Officer & Co-Founder
Qayyum sits at the cross-section of finance and technology having spent the greater part of his career with RBC Dominion Securities and Sentry Investments. He has deep expertise in capital markets, compliance processes, as well as mid and back office procedures for capital markets. During this time, he also found his fascination with blockchain and data science.
He is a UBC alumni, graduating with a Bachelor of Management degree with a concentration in finance. In 2018, Qayyum was named to BC Business Magazine’s 30 Under 30.
Matt Masiar, CTO
Matt Masiar previously served as web team lead at PlentyofFish, where he ran numerous large-scale technical operations on the world’s 3rd largest instance of .NET. He was responsible for crafting a long-term strategy to improve team velocity, reduce bottlenecks in development, and established Continuous Integration (CI) processes.
Greg Pinn, Head of Product Strategy
Formerly the head of Thomson Reuters’ most profitable company, World-Check, Greg led product strategy for World-Check for almost ten years—both before and after its $560-million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. World-Check is described as the “cornerstone of the Thomson Reuters risk business” and is the #1 compliance software for KYC, AML, ATF at Tier 1 and central banks globally. Greg’s experience in risk, governance and compliance analysis, product strategy, and leading large global development and sales teams were critical to World-Check’s success and now support him in his role to ensure iComply’s brand delivers confidence, trust, and security to all of our stakeholders.
