Flagright

Prior to starting Flagright, I worked at a remittance company, helping low-income immigrants send money back home. As the Director of Product responsible for financial crime compliance, I spent 15+ months trying to buy a transaction monitoring solution. Providers lied to my face as well as in written about what they could do, had unintuitive UIs, outdated API docs, couldn't handle real-time processing, or priced their solutions as if we were a bank. As a growing startup, we had no one competent and friendly enough to work with us.

As a fintech operator, I knew what "I" wanted. But I also built a huge network of founders, heads of AML, CCOs, and product managers who experienced the same issues in similar companies: remittance, neobanks, PSPs, payment gateways, card issuing, banking...

So I validated my hypotheses with them. They said:

🗣️ "We use solution A, but we hate it tbh, the system doesn't let us build rules although they promised we could during the demo."
🗣️ "We use solution B, but we hate it tbh, it's very difficult to configure and maintain."
🗣️ "We use solution C, but we hate it tbh, their customer support is terrible, we have 50+ tickets piling up for months."
🗣️ "We use solution D, but we hate it tbh, the integration breaks every month."
🗣️ "We use solution E, but we hate it tbh, it's very slow."
🗣️ "We hated all the alternatives, so we are building it in-house, but it's going very slow" (spending $500k+/year on the team - 3 engineers, 1 PM, 1 engineering lead + stakeholder time).

Some providers couldn’t even issue a sandbox environment. They stalled us for weeks, and when they finally gave access, we couldn’t log in because they forgot to wrap up the authentication .

How hard is it to provide a functional sandbox?

Today, I see companies boasting about their ability to issue sandbox environments. It's 2024. How is that a differentiator? Pure cringe behavior is what it is. These providers have such a low standard for what good looks like. This should be standard practice, not something to boast about. As a B2B SaaS company offering solutions in financial crime compliance, letting people test what they are gonna get should be the norm.

It’s laughable to see such basic functionality being marketed as a unique selling point. We should be focusing on real innovations and improvements, not celebrating the bare minimum. If you’re solving serious problems like financial crime, start with transparency and efficiency as your baseline. Anything less is unacceptable.

Out of this personal frustration, Madhu and I wanted to build something we would wanna buy. That's also where our no BS approach to sales comes from. We have a strict policy not to overpromise, even if that'll cost us business, knowing our competitors will lie about what's possible. We are in this for the long haul and thankfully the fincrime fighters realize that.