Specialist RegTech provider Shield is all set to revolutionize the financial compliance industry. With the setting up of the world’s first Autonomous Compliance Hub, the company is helping firms to be more efficient and thus, dramatically help reduce their expenses on non-revenue generating domains.

Shield’s CEO and Co-Founder, Shiran Weitzman, has been named as one of the top 50 financial industry company founders for 2019 by the Financial Technologist. A fete, Shiran believes comes with a lot of fulfillment and satisfaction. He adds, “Entrepreneurship comes with lots of fulfillment and satisfaction, but also with many sleepless nights, many red-eye flights and many decisions that are followed by doubt. Whilst entrepreneurship is highly revered and adored today, it does come with enormous challenges as well. It is the ‘small wins’ (like this recognition) that make it all worthwhile though.”

The Company

“Ofir (my co-founder) and I have known each other since we were 14 years old. We established Shield in 2018 with a mission to truly overcome the eComms compliance challenge, while considering the modern banking IT challenges” says Shiran. He adds that the goal was to provide a better approach to RegTech. “The market had been full of large, cumbersome and inflexible providers who all too often concentrated on a very narrow set of criteria. We have always felt the Regtech sphere needed to be shaken up and needed a fresh approach.” Shiran proudly proclaims that in just over a year his team has grown to 30 people worldwide, with offices in London, Denmark and a newly expanded headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel.”

The Platform

Explaining how the company drives Businesses Development, Shiran says that Shield offers a cross-regulation compliance platform that provides a complete view on eComms to proactively manage the compliance challenges and mitigate risks/threats. “It utilizes AI, Natural Language Processing and Visualization capabilities to make compliance more efficient and ROI driven. The platform protects financial firms against regulation infringements (along with the considerable fines and reputational damage), but it also protects the customers by ensuring all operations meet the stringent legal requirements in place in the country or territory.”

Shield’s Approach to AI

The Shield’s approach centers around automating compliance regulation tasks which have become impossible to do manually due to the vast amounts of data that need to be processed. Hence, AI is an essential part of the process. Noting that NLP has been a critical ingredient of the process, Shiran adds that the complexities and subtleties of language, ensure automation is reliable and avoids false positives. “When you consider all the languages in use in financial markets around the world (not to mention regional dialects and variations) it is quite a task! Shield is dedicated to meeting these needs and ensuring our platform meets all the requirements of our clients, wherever they are and whichever regulations they are subject to.”

Strategies within AI

“Our focus and the reason that we believe AI is not a common practice yet in financial firms is the problem of data quality,” Shiran notes that due to the creation of huge amount of data, through a variety of sources, AI initiatives usually hit a brick wall right from the start. That’s why Shield takes a unique approach to data that allows its users to ‘come as they are’ with no need for any adjustments.

The Strengths

“The Israeli entrepreneurial spirit, one that I am proud to be a part of, includes a few strengths, but the top one if not being afraid of anything” adds Shiran.

The Future

“We see huge opportunities ahead of us, as the market accepts our assumptions and way of thinking to resolve the compliance challenge in hand. It is an opportunity to take Shield to the next level, what we call hyper-growth stage, to seize the moment and make an impact,” Shiran signs off.