The Investment Will Accelerate Sigma’s Growth and Strengthen Its Position as the Category-Creator of Scalable Entity Risk Scoring
Sigma Ratings (“Sigma”), the global risk intelligence platform that powers compliant commercial relationships, today announced that Fitch Group, a global leader in financial information services, has invested in its business alongside FinTech Collective, Contour Ventures, and Barclays plc. The investment was made through Fitch Ventures, the equity investment arm of Fitch Group.
New York City-based Sigma plans to use the new funding to hire additional engineering and delivery talent to accelerate its growing risk and compliance technology offering. Stuart Jones, Jr., Chief Executive and founder of the startup also highlighted Fitch’s intention to help Sigma develop and expand its distribution through its operations in more than 30 countries.
With less than 1% of money laundering detected and an increasing level of regulatory and reputational risk associated with illicit finance more broadly, organizations and their boards are seeking automated solutions to proactively model, track and predict governance and financial crime-related risk across commercial relationships. Sigma’s technology helps organizations stay ahead of risk by reducing screening and monitoring tasks from hours to seconds.
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Shea Wallon, Managing Director, Fitch Ventures, said: “An increased focus from market participants on the risks related to financial crime and governance underpins Fitch’s decision to invest in Sigma, as well as to pursue joint work and research between Fitch Ratings and Sigma. Non-financial risks such as governance and financial crime are becoming more relevant to Fitch’s bank credit ratings. Sigma impressed us with their combination of technology and domain expertise in this area. We believe their technology solution will directly benefit Fitch, as well as the investors who use its ratings and research.”
Sigma’s approach is made possible through the combination of global datasets, cutting edge matching and retrieval algorithms, and expertise developed through senior-level work to combat financial crime at the United States Treasury Department. Utilizing Sigma’s cloud-based tools, bulge bracket financial institutions, asset managers, insurance companies and money service providers are all seeing a significant decrease in their time-to-insight.
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Stuart Jones, Jr., said: “We welcome Fitch, an original pioneer of the modern ratings system, as one of our investors and look forward to what we will accomplish together. As an existing partner and consumer of Sigma services, it is a natural next step for Fitch to invest now and help power the development of our technology which has broad application for anyone assessing risk globally.”
Fitch Ratings will be publishing a research report today, titled “Governance Risk for Banks”, which uses Sigma Ratings’ proprietary data as a source in three developed market bank case studies.
