The Verafin Story

Verafin was founded with a bold vision for tackling financial crime, specifically through fraud detection and anti-money laundering software for banks and credit unions. Established in 2003, their cloud-based platform was the first to leverage cross-institution data and enable collaboration among banks and credit unions to fight crime — a quantum leap for the industry.

Over the last 20 years, Verafin has navigated a dynamic regulatory environment and expanded its market focus from small and mid-sized community banks and credit unions to now many of the largest banks globally. Today, 2,400 partner institutions contribute to their FRAMLx information-sharing platform to receive alerts on suspicious transactions, share information, and collaborate on investigations in a cloud-based, secure environment. The company was acquired by Nasdaq in 2020.

Verafin & Spectrum

Verafin’s management team, led by CEO Jamie King, first met with Spectrum in 2010. Four years of relationship-building later – frequently meeting in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where Verafin was headquartered – we formalized the partnership with Spectrum’s first investment.

Over the next seven years, Spectrum supported Verafin through significant growth. Initially, financial institutions were reluctant to share data in the cloud, outside of their firewalls, and regulators were still building frameworks for financial institutions to collaborate compliantly. We had experience with complex regulation, introduced the team to our network of advisors and thought leaders, and helped advise on the FRAMLx platform that made Verafin the trusted platform for banks to collaborate on financial crime investigations.

We also worked with Verafin’s leaders to accelerate their ‘bowling pin’ growth strategy – onboarding ever larger, more sophisticated financial institutions through platform innovation and enhancements to their go-to-market.

We introduced a highly productive demand gen partner with deep sector expertise, recruited independent board members who could weigh in on sales strategy and execution, and leveraged our experiences working with World-Check to advise on penetrating big banks.

By 2021, the company had grown revenue by 4x, and had become the clear market leader in financial crime technology, culminating with the $2.75 billion acquisition of the business by Nasdaq.

Milestones

• 2003: Founded
• 2014: Partnered with Spectrum
• 2019: Shareholder recapitalization, with re-investment by Spectrum
• 2021: Acquired by Nasdaq