Why MindBridge.
As I was walking downtown Manhattan on a rainy March day, that also happened to coincide with the 2nd anniversary of MindBridge AI, a sad and chilling reminder of why we started MindBridge stared at me in the face.
Charles Murphy, a Partner that once worked for a Bernie Madoff feeder fund had committed suicide by jumping off the Sofitel in NYC — 9 years after the unravellings had begun. I instantaneously had tears in my eyes.
On a personal side, my family was decimated over two generations by a large case of fraud by an accountant. I was myself the victim of fraud and corruption — twice! One of my first memories was when I was 3 years old and the Brazilian police pointed a rifle at me and my mother as they said to my father “You pay, or they go”.
In the Madoff scheme, $65B was stolen and millions of victims were impacted. Charles Murphy had decided to put an end to his life, leaving a wife and 4 children behind. Over my career I had seen and helped countless compliance professionals working on many cases, many unheard but as devastating to families and too often, human life.
As professionals, we often talk about “accounting errors” and “governance issues” as if it’s just part of the new normal of business, but let’s not forget that financial crimes are real crimes. It’s surging to the point large national databases of financial criminals similar to the sex-offender registry list are being created. There are countless more stories of suicides, depressions, and lives that have been impacted by financial scandals ranging from Madoff to a small business owner that was forced to close his 15-man shop because an employee had gone rogue and he can no longer meet payroll. The lack of trust by individuals towards corporations and governments has become a sad reality and a reflection of how low we have fallen as a civil society.
In an era of alternative facts, fake news, inflated books and huge amounts of data, we decided that AI is needed as humans alone can not check all the facts. A recent article from Harvard Business Review suggested that professionals have “failed” and technology will take over their job. We believe that it is not that simple. Corporations and governments are acting within a specific regulatory framework and if that framework is obsolete, who should we blame? Let’s not forget that Rome did not fall because it had bad armies, or suffered from a poor economy. It fell because of corruption by all individuals at various levels of its civil society.
All members of the MindBridge AI team are driven by making the world a better place. From our CEO, who in addition to being a successful serial entrepreneur, has led the largest corporate responsibility conference in North America, all the way through to our data scientist, development, marketing, sales and administrative teams, we stand for the world being fixed.We firmly believe that Artificial Intelligence will augment human cognitive capabilities to compensate for the increasing demands placed on professionals.
Two years after starting MindBridge AI, we have spent countless hours with executives, accountants, bankers, lawyers and fraud fighters and there is still so much work ahead to make a positive societal impact. What we did not anticipate is that containing fraud and restoring trust is just the beginning of increase in productivity and the key to unlocking substantial value for our customers. Fraud is often the canary in the coal mine. If you have a case of fraud, it is typically foreshadowed by breakdowns in process and management. Fraud is often enabled by circumstances relating to management issues, poor system controls, a toxic culture and inadequate hiring practices. By unleashing an AI expert system that is capable of detecting 80% to 170% more issues in data than existing methods and softwares, our customers led us down a path to introduce solutions that were beyond our original direction. World class partners have said that the MindBridge AI platform goes “well beyond the capabilities of any data analytics technology we’ve seen”. One of our coolest projects (so far!) was associated with MindBridge’s acceptance into the Bank of England FinTech program.
The analytic capabilities of countless finance professionals are severely limited, and by default they have been forced to use aging tools. Today’s professionals spend countless hours in visualization, data acquisition and analytics softwares that creates more work and generates analyst fatigue. MindBridge’s goal is to invert this trend, and have the computing work for the humans, not the other way around
This is why MindBridge introduced the world’s first commercial AI Auditor at the end of 2016. We wanted to provide professionals with an easy way to perform their financial data analysis more efficiently, with higher assurance and in a consistent, reliable, unbiased manner by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence. By doing so, we can minimize the risk of financial loss, and ultimately restore trust in corporations and governments — and help prevent the tragic impacts of fraud that society has experienced. The market so reaction has been fantastic, we are being featured by various press outlets in Europe and North America, partnered with existing software providers and I am filled with confidence that it’s a matter of time before we see the benefits of this technology on a very large scale.
See the links below for the news coverage following the announcement of a recent round of funding:
Bank Of England and MindBridge Ai Collaboration
Thomson Reuters Announcement
Globe and Mail Feature, 16 June 2017
National Post, 19 June 2017 (the digital version will be available in a couple of days)
Betakit
www.betakit.com/mindbridge-raises-4–3-million-with-goal-to-ipo-within-five-years
