Tookitaki enters PHL market, offers AML solutions

TOOKITAKI, a regulatory technology firm based in Singapore, is entering the Philippine market to bring scalable and machine learning-powered product offerings to help financial institutions address money laundering risks.

Tookitaki Chief Executive Officer and Founder Abhishek Chatterjee said in an interview with BusinessWorld last week that the firm will offer Anti-Money Laundering Solutions (AMLS) to enable businesses to build comprehensive and customized risk-based AML compliance programs.

“The vision of Tookitaki is to make this world safer by providing anti-financial crime software to detect and prevent financial crime globally,” Mr. Chatterjee said.

“Our goal in the next two years is to become the leader in AML software in the Philippine market, and when I say leader, I mean both building the network to fight and share knowledge so that the awareness in the industry is much more than what it is today,” Mr. Chatterjee said.

Tookitaki is looking to develop an invite-only hub network of experts, consulting companies, and non-profit organizations to collate information on money laundering developments in the country.

“For us, every customer of ours actually gets access to a large ecosystem, which thereby means that they are far better protected than anybody else. That’s our differentiator, our email ecosystem, AML network and our approach to machine learning, which is sort of federated in nature but still protects the privacy laws that every jurisdiction has,” Mr. Chatterjee said. “Once (clients) install the software in their private network and they get access to those scenarios, their network is protected from crimes related to AML.”

“We are very excited that we are not just launching an email software tool, but we are actually launching that ecosystem. Without the ecosystem, fighting financial crime is extremely difficult. I believe with that ecosystem, we can really bring a much more integrated AML framework to the Philippines,” he said.

When asked what factors the company considered in choosing to enter the Philippines, he said the country stood out because of its ability to bring in innovation quickly.

“For us, we evaluated very simply on impact. What impact can we make with the software on the country’s appetite for innovation? And when we made an internal score, it was very clear that the Philippines actually stands high up in our radar,” Mr. Chatterjee said.

He also lauded the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ (BSP) evolving regulations for the financial ecosystem amid the growth in digital transactions.

“This was augmented by the BSP’s broad thesis about launching the various licenses … which essentially meant that the country overall will actually bring in more regulations, more structure in the overall ecosystem, because the country wants to bring digitalization in the process,” he said. — Keisha B. Ta-asan