Synalogik raises £3m in Series A Funding round led by former Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy and Bill Currie

January 24, 2022 | Sarah Blackburn

Investment will enable the company to further enhance its Scout® aggregation and reporting platform that allows operators to streamline AML and affordability checks

Synalogik, the company whose Scout® data aggregation and reporting platform allows online gambling operators to streamline customer profiling checks for AML and affordability for improved compliance, has raised more than £3m in a Series A funding round.

The funding round was led by high-profile investors Bill Currie, founder of retail, e-commerce and tech investment fund, the William Currie Group and Sir Terry Leahy, former CEO of Tesco. Gambling Industry heavyweight Mark Blandford also increased his existing stake in the company.

Synalogik will use the capital raised to scale its Scout® solution across different markets and territories and to expedite the launch of additional solutions that have been in development over the past 18 months. These solutions will widen the application of its data aggregation, risk identification and decision intelligence capabilities.

The company, which provides its Scout® solution to tier one operators including Entain and Betway, will also invest in its people, research and development with plans to double the size of its engineering team and enhance its dedicated customer support department over the coming months.

Synalogik was founded by a group of former police officers, barristers and members of the intelligence community who were frustrated by the inefficiency of manually aggregating data from disparate sources.

Synalogik’s solution, Scout®, is a unique platform that enables organisations to automate data aggregation from multiple disparate sources, identify risk and report findings in seconds. Scout® supports users with regulatory compliance, affordability, anti-money laundering and fraud investigation.

The solution quickly became the most efficient way for compliance teams within the gambling sector to carry out player profile checks for AML and affordability as part of wider compliance processes, saving up to 85% of their time.

Gareth Mussell, CEO at Synalogik, said: “The data landscape is exploding, organisations have unprecedented opportunities to make intelligent decisions based upon the data within their eco-system or immediately available to them. Organisations are struggling to harness these opportunities and often rely on manual processes to aggregate data – this is simply not scalable.”

“In 2021, a total of £32.1million was paid by 15 gambling businesses as a result of fines or regulatory settlements – more than any previous year – and with regulations becoming increasingly stringent, the burden and cost of compliance will only continue to increase for gambling operators using manual processes.”

“Scout® has been developed to overcome these challenges and it’s great to see that the potential for the business and our growing suite of solutions has been recognised by high profile investors such as Sir Terry Leahy, Bill Currie and Mark Blandford.

“Closing this Series A funding round allows us to rapidly scale up our capabilities, increase our headcount and bring new and exciting products to market that will allow us to better serve existing and new clients.”

Bill Currie said “Synalogik displayed real vision in their plans for utilising data aggregation and enabling businesses to get access and assess data more cost-effectively, we believe we are investing in a really exciting company”

Mark Blandford, investor in Synalogik, added: “Compliance is now the number one priority for operators in regulated markets such as the UK and in Synalogik and Scout® they have the best team and solution to streamline Know Your Customer (KYC), Enhanced Due Diligence (EDD) and affordability checks.”

“Not only that, but Scout® allows them to maximise efficiency, make decisions faster, increase retention and improve analyst decisions.”

Sir Terry Leahy, added: “The threat from money laundering and fraud to public and private organisations is very significant and growing . Businesses are struggling to meet compliance standards and need better solutions like the Scout product from Synalogik which transforms the speed of data aggregation and analysis of risk.”