Please introduce yourself, your team, and your company.
I am Pascal Nizri, the founder and CEO of Chekk, a digital identity startup. I have 20 years experience in the Financial Industry, having worked for HSBC across geographies (France, UK, Hong-Kong, Australia, Indonesia), disciplines (strategy, business, technology, digital), and positions (Global Chief of Staff for Retail Banking; Chief Operating Officer for Retail Banking & Wealth Management in countries; Global Head of Transformation for Private Banking).
Chekk is a leading digital identity and eKYC startup. It provides secure end-to-end Know-Your-Customer solutions that remove the pain and costs of on-boarding, verification and interactions between financial institutions and their retail and corporate customers.
What’s unique about your company?
Chekk provides an exhaustive ecosystem of capabilities addressing the real needs of financial industry players, in which the end-users own their data, opening-up exciting data portability use cases (like KYC utilities).Â
With Chekk, individuals and businesses are empowered to own their digital identity and control what data they share, and companies get a secure platform for seamless data request and on-going customer interactions (including dynamic customer due diligence at on-boarding and KYC refresh; connectivity to people & business registries, AML lists, company hierarchies, pre-population; electronic verification of identity with OCR, FaceMatching, Proof of Life and antifraud for individuals, directors and UBOs; secure data wallet and messaging for consent, data portability, alerts, statements).
Chekk is a leading digital identity and eKYC startup. It provides secure end-to-end Know-Your-Customer solutions that remove the pain and costs of on-boarding, verification and interactions between financial institutions and their retail and corporate customers.
What experience does your team have? What is their background?
Chekk leadership team has over 120 years of experience in the financial industry and technology, led by 2 co-founders: myself with 20 years at HSBC, leading and growing multi-billion dollar businesses around the world; and Benjamin Petit, with 15 years leading business development and M&A activities in Asia.
What are the biggest challenges for Chekk?
We are victims of our own success. On top of our existing customers and prospects, we receive a lot of in-bound contacts from banks, insurers, FinTech companies and others (eg., retail, transport, online marketplaces…) who are looking for a better solution to onboard, verify and interact with their customers throughout their life cycle. It is not always easy for us to keep up but we are currently raising additional funding to recruit and support our expansion across additional verticals and countries.
What are some recent milestones for Chekk?
On the product side, Chekk has recently launched new exciting capabilities, such our latest Chekk Mobile app with improved document of ID scanning and biometric verification technologies which work much faster and even offline, as well as company discovery tools in the Chekk Web platform to on-board corporates and automatically map a structure of their entities and directors along side dynamic KYC forms.
We have also signed additional customers across Asia and Europe, such as retail banks, fintech companies or national sovereign funds for their corporate on-boarding, and won awards from Microsoft, IBM and Money 20/20.
What’s your advice for future entrepreneurs?
Know your market and the problem you are solving for, so that it can guide your vision, strategy, product, teams, etc. And then it’s about finding the right balance between delivering on this vision and iterating on it to adapt to your customers.
How has MOX accelerator program helped you and your business grow?
SOSV is backing Chekk and the MOX accelerator programme is enabling us to connect to additional customers, investors, etc. and accelerate our growth even further.