“Know-Your-Business” with SimpleForm
SimpleForm was founded in October 2020, and provides the “SimpleCheck” service that provides information on more than 5 million entities nationwide in an instant just by inputting a corporate name, and issues a company report in 30 seconds together with risk information that SimpleForm has independently accumulated and detected.
Incubate Fund and others have seeded SimpleForm with JPY 50m in March 2021 and JPY 150m in December 2021, before DNX Ventures lead the JPY 680m Series A round in May 2022. Additionally, SimpleForm has received JPY 70m in debt financing.
The service can also be customized according to specific business requirements, including analysis and utilization of various data sources, consulting on business flows, development of screening systems, and other support. Since the official release of SimpleCheck in June 2022, it has been introduced to more than 50 companies, mainly major financial institutions, business companies, platforms, etc. Resona Bank has become the most recent addition to the client list, with the announcement coming on December 12 that the bank would be using SimpleCheck in its corporate account opening process.
SimpleForm received tailwinds from the publication of the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) 4th Mutual Evaluation of Japan in August 2021, which assessed the AML & KYC of the nation’s financial institutions as “improved, but not yet good enough”. These improved slightly with the Follow-up Report on Japan in October this year, but as Japan will report back to the FATF on progress achieved in improving the implementation of its AML/CFT measures in October 2024, financial institutions have been strongly urged by the Financial Services Agency to develop systems by March 2024, the end of the current fiscal year.
In addition, online account openings, which are now pervasise in retail banking, have also become increasingly common on the corporate banking side, so that banks require system support for what used to be a face-to-face business process.
As far as global startups in this space are concerned, we came across Markaaz, headquartered in Austin, Texas, as the winner of the regional scale-up competition for Hong Kong FinTech week. Markaaz lays claim to a unique directory of over 300 million global business records that enables enterprise businesses to improve their SME onboarding and monitoring.
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