In 2020, across continents and industries, life as we knew it changed completely. At Fourthline, we worked alongside each other and our clients to adapt to the challenges and instabilities of a profoundly altered landscape. We optimized our remote operations, mitigated continuity risks, established new connection pathways, and made our way forward amidst great uncertainty.
As it turns out, Fourthline grew at a record rate in 2020 while achieving a succession of other accomplishments and milestones:
We welcomed some of Europe’s most respected (neo)banks, online brokers, insurers, and fintechs as new clients. Nationale-Nederlanden, Solarisbank, flatex, DEGIRO, KPN, Trade Republic, Bol.com, Xapo, Vivid Money, and Wish.com join other industry leaders who now rely on Fourthline for their KYC solutions.
We met all client service-level agreements (SLAs) in every month, despite challenges presented by Covid-19 and corresponding lockdowns.
We continued to experience explosive growth, surging over 100 percent in the fourth quarter alone. Since the launch of our KYC solutions three years ago, our platform continues to process millions of verifications.
We gained recognition for our innovative KYC solutions from industry authorities like Digital Top 50 Awards, Banking Tech Awards, Deloitte Technology Fast 50, and RegTech100.
As identity fraud attempts surged to unprecedented levels in 2020, Fourthline rose to the challenge. Despite the fast-changing circumstances imposed by Covid-19, we fulfilled our commitment to helping clients meet their compliance requirements and protect their businesses against unremitting fraud attacks.
Along the way, we gathered learnings, forged new bonds, and built technology that modernizes the way regulated enterprises tackle KYC.
New Client Highlights
Fourthline is proud to partner with the finest brands in banking, fintech, and beyond to deliver KYC solutions that set a new standard for fraud prevention. Among the companies that now rely on Fourthline’s KYC solutions are:
Solarisbank, a Berlin-based banking-as-a-service platform valued at €320M following its June 2020 Series C funding of €60M, that uses Fourthline as KYC partner for its banking clients.
Trade Republic, an Accel-backed German brokerage with €79M in funding, that chose Fourthline as the KYC provider to support its aggressive European expansion plans.
Nationale-Nederlanden, a publicly-traded insurance and asset manager operating in 18 countries, that selected Fourthline for banking KYC, remediation and proof-of-life.
Flatex and DEGIRO, Europe’s largest retail online broker with over 1.2 million customers (publicly traded and now operating as flatexDEGIRO), that both separately selected Fourthline to safely onboard new customers.
Bol.com, the Netherlands’ largest e-commerce retailer with over 10 million customers, verifies its 20,000+ external resellers through Fourthline’s KYC for Business solution.
Thanks to the trust placed in us by our new clients and longtime partners alike, we enjoyed another record year of growth—more than doubling our annual recurring revenue over the course of 2020 and maintaining our position as Europe’s fastest-growing KYC and digital identity solutions provider.
Product Innovation
This year our product and tech teams worked tirelessly to build technology that reduces case handling times, maximizes fraud detection accuracy, drives higher conversions, provides intelligent reporting, and evolves to meet ever-changing identity fraud tactics. While we launched many feature updates and refined countless processes, a few developments deserve special mention:
We launched
the Fourthline KYC app
, which enables iOS and Android users to run through our KYC flow in seconds.
We developed a host of AI algorithms that address everything from optimizing image capture quality to recognizing, analyzing and automatically processing documents. One of the tangible results is that Fourthline's OCR models now performs better than Google's.
We launched
an improved KYC dashboard
that provides clients with insights into their performance data at the click of a button.
We improved our proprietary
ex post
monitoring techniques to now identify 20 to 30 percent additional fraud.
Industry Recognition
We hope it’s obvious that we continuously innovate in order to better serve our clients. Whether we’re building more intuitive algorithms, assembling more efficient ways to address compliance requirements, or engineering new fraud identification and prevention tactics to address the newest generation of fraud techniques, we’re always seeking a smarter solution. We’re happy to report that our industry thinks so, too. This year, Fourthline was honored as a finalist in the Digital Top 50 Awards and the Banking Tech Awards, along with being shortlisted as a Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Rising Star. Moreover, to kick off the new year, Fourthline was recognized as one of RegTech100’s top tech companies transforming compliance, risk management, and cybersecurity in 2021.
From our team to yours, congratulations on making it across the finish line of what truly was an unprecedented year. We look forward to learning and growing together in 2021.
