Ashwin Nayak and Chris Nobili first met through a mutual friend and connected over their interests in banking and risk regulation technology. What was supposed to be a quick introductory lunch turned into a three-hour meeting wherein the two used ketchup bottles and salt shakers to brainstorm the future of financial institutions.
From there, the pair set up weekly meetings to brainstorm how to solve banks’ lack of a comprehensive solution to address risk regulations. Those conversations blossomed into Auditrol, a startup that provides financial institutions with an efficient, organized way to manage risk regulations.
“We’ve created a set of tools—and it’s all online, enterprise resource, the most cutting-edge AI tech, everything you can imagine. We’ve embodied it into a set of tools that enables banks to count on their data,” Nobili said.
Auditrol provides banks and other financial institutions with metadata on all of their transactions; this in turn provides analysis about data points that the institutions can use to more easily monitor and manage risks.
The startup has created an AI tool that has been trained to conduct assessments on banks’ data to determine where they are or are not in compliance with the specific regulations and policy procedures that apply to their institution’s type and size. The AI analyzes these regulations and provides a risk score evaluating compliance, as well as feedback on exactly where and how the bank may not be in compliance with specific regulations.
Rather than simply creating an array of individual tools, Auditrol was designed to provide financial institutions with one software platform that can answer the questions of various stakeholders, from compliance analysts to executive officers, Nayak said.
“We’re the only company that we know of in existence that tries solving the problem this way, and we’re coming right at the heart of every tool that you would layer on top of it,” Nobili said.
Creating a unique, comprehensive software
Nayak and Nobili both have extensive experience in their respective fields of technology and banking, and neither is new to the startup world (nor that of financial services startups specifically). This experience has granted them both not only knowledge of the challenges and grind of building a startup, but also how to navigate the financial services domain.
Nayak said that the nature of the startup’s proprietary AI, not being a simple chatbot but rather an enterprise-grade solution that is transparent and robust, furthers the software’s uniqueness. So too does the fact that Auditrol is designed to analyze financial institutions’ own databases, whereas most risk management software addresses risks and controls through sample data sets.
The metadata component of Auditrol’s platform, which analyzes data points over time, is also key in distinguishing the startup. It helps stakeholders actively interact with and make decisions based on the metadata, Nobili said.
“We want people to be able to understand how to interact with the data, not have the data force them to interact with it in a certain way, and that’s the big differentiator,” Nobili said.
Monetizing a universal problem
Every financial institution in the world needs to address risks and regulations, Nobili said, and most lack a comprehensive solution to do so. The universality of risk regulation leads to a sizable total addressable market that the startup has identified as greater than $100 billion.
Auditrol offers access to the platform through a tiered annual subscription with three tiers based on what tools a financial institution wants to access.
The financial services industry is set to grow at an annual rate of 8.5% for the next decade, providing ample opportunity to grow the startup, Nayak said.
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Startup: Auditrol
Co-Founders: Ashwin Nayak (CEO), Chris Nobili (President)
Founded: 2024
Team size: 10
Location: Charlotte
Website: www.auditrol.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
Auditrol recently completed gener8tor’s gBETA accelerator program and participated in a showcase at the Seed The South Capital Summit. The startup is also part of LaunchCLT. Both programs helped Nayak and Nobili to enhance Auditrol based on expert feedback.
Auditrol’s immediate focus remains on financial institutions. That said, Nobili noted that the startup’s software is applicable to any industry and company that manages data. There is thus potential for expansion to other industries moving forward.
“Think of any company that has and manages data, it could be applicable to it,” Nobili said. “So it’s literally every company of size and scale.”
