🎁 Convera's Fintech 2025 report just dropped. Here are the top takeaways for compliance teams: → Regulators are tightening their grip on bank-fintech partnerships, increasing scrutiny on third-party risk management and oversight of fintech relationships. → Global data privacy laws are in a state of flux, with the EU's Data Act complementing GDPR and the US seeing a surge in state-level privacy legislation — creating an even more complex regulatory environment. → The PSD3 proposal is set to introduce stronger authentication requirements and clearer rules for accessing payment systems and data in the EU. → Cross-border payments are facing heightened compliance challenges, with growing emphasis on robust AML procedures and increased focus on transaction monitoring for international transfers → Regtech solutions are transforming compliance, with the market projected to reach $85.92 billion by 2032, as new tools for KYC, AML, and broader regulatory become essential for financial institutions. The message is clear: staying ahead of the regulatory curve is no longer optional. It's a critical success factor for banks and fintechs today. If you’re looking to upgrade your KYC, KYB, or AML workflow — drop us a message!
Accend (YC S23)
Financial Services
Improve Ops Efficiency & Quality Excel in Compliance with Accend
About us
Accend helps Fintech & Banks' Compliance/Ops teams to accelerate Business Onboarding and KYB reviews
- Website
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https://www.withaccend.com/
External link for Accend (YC S23)
- Industry
- Financial Services
- Company size
- 2-10 employees
- Headquarters
- San Francisco Bay Area
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2023
Locations
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Primary
San Francisco Bay Area, US
Employees at Accend (YC S23)
Updates
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How the initial idea for Accend evolved into what we are today: a platform to accelerate onboarding and compliance for banks and fintechs! 👇
In honor of YC’s new fall batch, I wanted to share our most vulnerable moment as founders. The biggest ‘oh, shit’ moment we had as a company happened during Y Combinator. Not many people know this, but we started Accend (YC S23) as an invoice financing product for small businesses. During our first week at Y Combinator, we quickly realized our product wasn’t sustainable because the cost of capital was ridiculously high. So we went back to the whiteboard. It was a real moment of panic for us. Around that time, our YC group partner, Aaron Epstein, told us to focus on our experience at Brex and to build a solution around that. The problem is - when you’re too close to problems in your day-to-day job, they become blurry. Everydayness has a way of obscuring critical issues and making them fade into the background. To get around this, we had to really take a step back and look at the bigger picture of our workflows at Brex. Only then were we able to see how the onboarding due diligence process for fintechs could be faster, easier, and to a large extent, more accurate with AI. This problem stared at us in the face every day at Brex. It still surprises me that we didn’t see it straight away. We went and spoke to a bunch of other individuals, fintechs and financial institutions who all validated the same problem, which led to Accend as we know it today. Now, we have an internal rule as a company: whenever we feel stuck, we think back to how Aaron told us to zoom out. It almost always gives us the perspective we need to get unstuck.
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We’re reimagining web search for compliance teams. We've all been there - 37 tabs open, trying to piece together a company's story from scattered web sources. It's inefficient and a recipe for missed details. We've built a better way. Our platform consolidates comprehensive web data into a single, actionable source of intelligence. → Comprehensive web crawling that leaves no stone unturned → AI-powered summaries of products, services, and business models → Beneficial ownership mapping that cuts through complex structures → Real-time updates to keep you ahead of the curve No more tab juggling. No more outdated info. Just clean, consolidated data ready for your analysis.
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"It’s a cautionary tale for banks and their fintech partners about the risks of aggressive growth in highly regulated industries without having robust risk management and compliance frameworks in place." 🔈🚨 How CFSB is slowly de-risking itself after a period of aggressive growth through fintech partnerships — and what this means for compliance 👇
☕ — CFSB is shrinking itself after aggressively growing through banking-as-a-service partnerships. Here’s the background: CFSB is a tiny lender that grew its assets by 438% from 2018 to 2024 through nearly 40 fintech partnerships — including in higher risk categories like cross-border payments and crypto. At the time, banks across the world were cutting off risky fintechs. ‘Leaning into the void’ was a great strategy for asset growth… but growth at any cost can backfire. Some of CFSB’s fintech partners have faced serious legal issues, including sanctions violations and links to fraud schemes. Now, it looks like CFSB is pulling back from some of those partnerships: - Wise ceased offering new USD account credentials or debit cards through CFSB - Revolut abandoned plans to partner with CFSB, opting for Lead Bank instead - CFSB withdrew its application to open a Delaware branch right after filing it The takeaway: whether we want to admit it or not, there’s always going to be tension between rapid growth and regulatory compliance in banking. It’s a cautionary tale for banks and their fintech partners about the risks of aggressive growth in highly regulated industries without having robust risk management and compliance frameworks in place. S/O to Jason Mikula for covering this in Fintech Business Weekly! Highly recommend reading the full article by Jason linked in the comments here 👇
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Multi-level marketing schemes (MLMs) are quietly becoming a major headache for fintechs and their banking partners. Here's why: 1. MLMs operate in a legal gray area. They're permitted in the US but restricted or banned elsewhere. 2. Traditional Know Your Business (KYB) checks are falling short. MLMs have become experts at disguising themselves online — like the websites below! 3. Fintechs face intense time pressure. Customers expect near-instant onboarding, leaving little time for deep risk assessment. We're seeing a concerning trend: 👉 MLM websites mimicking premium brands 👉 Subtle recruitment tactics hidden behind slick marketing 👉 High-pressure "parties" and "shows" serving as recruitment funnels Our fintech clients report that almost all have designated MLMs as high-risk. The challenge? Identifying them quickly and accurately. Accend AI can perform this job better than humans. 🔍 It knows MLM red flags that humans often miss, like whether these products target customers vulnerable to MLM schemes (like homemakers and retirees looking for “side hustles”) 🔍 Accend analyzes broader context, looking beyond surface-level data to uncover hidden MLM structures like promoting social gatherings. Don't let MLMs slip through your compliance net. The reputational and regulatory risks are too high to ignore.
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Business compliance = achieve compliance by design 🤝
One thing not discussed enough: compliance professionals don’t WANT to come in at the end of a good sales cycle and put a halt on things. It’s really not a fun rep to have. But unfortunately, the narrative is often “business vs. compliance.” Pitting both against each other completely overlooks just how useful the compliance function can be beyond the risk proposition, to the actual the business itself. For example, compliance has the most insight into your customers than anyone else in the company. It’s literally their job to Know Your Customer. Compliance can feed back certain insights into how you manage your relationships with those customers. A piece of information discovered in the KYC/KYB process can be a signal that your customer might need an additional service - and thus a trigger for providing that service. Obviously this is just an example and there’s data privacy to take into account, but it proves the point. Business and compliance functions can collaborate to achieve compliance by design but ALSO to genuinely help your company evolve by using insights that are as close to the customer as you can get.
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Pleo is one of the largest growing fintechs in Europe 📈 And now, they’re growing without hiring… We couldn’t be more thrilled that the Pleo team is using Accend to automate their Know Your Business research workflows so their analysts can focus on higher-value work: quality assurance. The upside for the business: Pleo can now onboard more customers without adding members to their operations team. To join the ranks of Pleo and other forward-looking Risk and Compliance teams using Accend to accelerate their business onboarding process - message us!
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3-5% of the world's GDP is laundered each year - and the criminals behind it all are really hard to outsmart. To combat this, AML needs to consist of more than just rule-based systems. We need intelligent, adaptive solutions that can outthink the criminals.
I’ve had years of experience in Risk and Compliance. If you’re a bank, here’s the bad news: sophisticated criminals are really hard to outsmart. Traditional AML systems - while necessary - are tripped up by inefficiencies and false positives that distract from genuine threats. They're struggling to keep up with criminals who are constantly evolving their tactics. And it shows! A staggering $2.17 to $3.61 trillion is laundered every year. That's 3-5% of the world's GDP. Let that sink in. To combat this, we need more than just rule-based systems. We need intelligent, adaptive solutions that can outthink the criminals. Enter AI and machine learning. Here's how AI is changing the game in AML: 👉 Dramatic reduction in false positives, allowing compliance teams to focus on real threats 👉 Enhanced pattern recognition, spotting complex money laundering schemes that traditional systems miss 👉 Real-time transaction monitoring, catching suspicious activities as they happen 👉 Improved client profile monitoring, analyzing behavior to detect risk indicators 👉 Integration of deep learning and NLP, processing vast amounts of structured and unstructured data The future of AML is here, and it's powered by AI. Financial institutions that embrace these technologies will be much better equipped to protect themselves from the threat of money laundering.
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Due diligence is a HUGE cost center for most banks, and the stats show it ⤵
An interesting stat I came across: 60% of commercial banks spend over 33% of their compliance budgets on KYC. For 20% of banks, this number jumps up to 50%. Fintechs and banks are spending HUGE portions of their compliance budgets on doing due diligence on businesses and customers. This just goes to show that: 1/ Due diligence is extremely important. 2/ It’s a huge cost center. At Accend (YC S23), our job is to streamline business onboarding and enhance compliance — and so for us, it makes sense to focus on the most important and fundamental task at hand: due diligence. This is existential to a financial institution’s presence. Because if you onboard customers without doing due diligence, guess what happens? You get into trouble, your customers will lose trust, and you'll have less revenue. And nobody wants that.
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🚀 Quality, efficiency, cost reduction - why choose when you can have all three? Information overload is the enemy of efficiency. Accend's streamlined online research tool cuts through the noise, consolidating data from across the web into a single, comprehensive summary. We're not just saving your team from tab overload - we're providing a clear, concise picture of each business and its beneficial owners. This means faster, more accurate validations, and the ability to handle a higher volume of reviews without sacrificing quality. In a landscape where speed and accuracy are paramount, Accend gives you both.
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