LeapRate Exclusive… The Danish RegTech firm Muinmos is celebrating its 10th anniversary. LeapRate spoke to Remonda Kirketerp-Møller, Founder and CEO, Muinmos about the firm’s key milestones and future plans.
LR: Hi Remonda and thank you for joining us again! Muinmos is celebrating a 10-year anniversary – a big one. What have been the highlights looking back?
Remonda: There have been so many highlights over the last 10 years. I set up Muinmos in 2012 to solve a real-life problem that I encountered in my days at both Saxo-Bank and CFH (now Finalto), which is how to make client onboarding both fast and fully compliant. The goal was to make client onboarding a dream – which is why I called the company Muinmos – the Latin word “somnium” (“dream”) in reverse. Funnily enough, a lot of clients, when they first see our client onboarding platform, say it’s like a “dream”, and that makes me very happy every time.
In general, we love what we do – it’s a win-win situation. Better customer experience AND better compliance. It’s sometimes a very detail-oriented and not very illustrious labour, so the highlights are not very “illustrious”; but every product enhancement, every “thank you, your product made our lives so much easier”, every demo call – they’re all highlights to us.
We’re geeks, basically – we love data, we love solving problems, we love doing things others haven’t done. These are our highlights.
But of course there are also bigger highlights – in the last year and a half we have received six awards and accolades; we have also featured highly in very well respected rankings, for example, Chartis Research recently rated us as “Category Leaders” in CLM Solutions; and some very big institutions signed as clients, which for us is always nice as it’s a validation of our product and our company culture.
LR: How has the business evolved since its inception to now?
Remonda: On the product side, the basic idea stayed the same – it’s the same idea I drew on a napkin in a café ten years ago; but the platform of course is now so much more sophisticated than our original version – and we split it into 3 distinct modules. Together they provide a complete automated onboarding solution but clients can also come to us for individual modules to integrate with their existing systems.
On the business side, the market has changed significantly, especially in the last two or three years, and financial institutions are now much more willing to adapt RegTech solutions – in fact, these days they understand that it’s their only way to remain competitive. To both (a) keep customer experience at expected levels, (b) remain compliant and (c) keep costs low.
So we’ve seen incredible growth, and I see it only increasing in the coming years, as automated client onboarding has become the standard now, rather than the “premium”.
LR: How has the industry changed in recent years, in your opinion? What is the role of RechTech in the financial industry now?
Remonda: When I started Muinmos there was no such thing as RegTech – in fact, many people told me to give up on my dream as they said the market would never be ready to automate the onboarding process at the level I had envisaged it. However, more players have since come into the industry and that has helped to create credibility for the RegTech sector and has propelled us forwards.
The RegTech industry is now a sector of its own, said to reach USD 87.17 Billion by 2028 (Verified Market Research, 08.03.22), and it plays, in my mind, a very important role in the financial industry – basically, it’s the mediator between financial institutions, digitisation and regulatory frameworks.
These days especially, when most commerce is electronic; and new, completely virtual trading arenas like the metaverse and instruments like Cryptocurrency and NFT emerge; it’s super-important to have a robust RegTech industry that can bridge the gap between the regulatory realm, often slow-to-react through cumbersome legislative processes, and the fast-changing tech-financial world.
We’re very proud and excited to be at the forefront of this very dynamic sector which is so important to the secure operation of the financial markets.
LR: We see tightening of regulation across the board, how does that influence RegTech solutions?
Remonda: The more regulation, the more RegTech! Successfully navigating regulation without compromising the customer and without blowing up costs, after all, is the problem we’re trying to solve – and the heavier the regulation is, the more RegTech can help with that.
In fact, research conducted by EY and the University of Cambridge found, that “there is a clear link between the surge in RegTech market entry… and the amount of new regulation introduced or implemented” (the Global RegTech Industry Benchmark Report, 2019).
So tightening regulation is, generally, good for RegTech companies. Also tightening supervision – the more financial institutions are fined for incompliance, the more they are incentivised to invest in compliance.
LR: How does this affect forex brokers? As a compliance specialist, what advice would you give them in meeting regulatory requirements?
Remonda: Forex brokers, as other market players, are affected by tightening regulation, and, in fact, in the past couple of years I think they were among the most affected by them. There is a lot of emphasis from regulators on forex brokers, and a lot of fines are being levied.
Accordingly, we saw a lot of forex brokers adopt our solution, moving from a state of incompliance or partial compliance, to full compliance while actually improving the customer onboarding experience. There seems to be a phase of maturity in this market now, which is good to see after many years in which this wasn’t the case.
I think forex brokers learnt that compliance doesn’t have to come at the expense of gaining a competitive edge – and that you can have both, simply by automating the entire process. We automate a big chunk of the regulatory process – all the client onboarding process, including KYC/AML checks, client categorisation, suitability, appropriateness, client risk assessment – all this automatically and in under 3 minutes.
What I’d advise to forex brokers is to look for RegTech solutions that give them as complete a solution as possible – so they don’t have to manage dozens of suppliers, and have as much of a “one stop shop” service as possible.
LR: Earlier this year, you were included in the prestigious Women in FinTech Powerlist 2021. Can you tell us why this matters?
Remonda: There are a few very male-dominated sectors, and finance is one of them. I think that’s a shame – female presence can change so many things. There’s been plenty of research which reveals that having females on the board, for example, results in strong company performance.
I’ve also always believed that diversity is important. A diverse team – whether that’s gender, ethnicity, age etc. – helps you look at things from lots of different perspectives. The industry is slowly changing but I think it’s important to celebrate diversity and encourage a more diverse workforce in this sector. On a personal level, I was thrilled to have been selected for the Women in Fintech Powerlist and to be considered a role model for doing a job that I love.
LR: What are Muinmos’s plans for the future?
Remonda: Be to client onboarding platforms what Microsoft is to operating systems.
