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cover art for Owl with Sean Merat (CEO), Sohrab Merat (CPO), & Vahid Mirjalili (COO)) | E74

Fintech Impact

Owl with Sean Merat (CEO), Sohrab Merat (CPO), & Vahid Mirjalili (COO)) | E74

Ep. 74
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Summary:

In this 74th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host interviews the team behind Owl.co, Sean Merat the CEO, Sohrab Merat the CPO, and Vahid Mirjalili the COO. Owl.co is a company that has created a solution to assist major financial institutions with their AML, KYC, onboarding, and fraud protection. Sean, Sohrab, and Vahid all elaborate on successful ways Owl.co has serviced clients in its short existence, how they work within compliance, privacy issues, and regulations, and how Owl.co can help tackle fraud issues.


Episode Highlights:

● 00:51: – Vahid Mirjalili explains what Owl.com is and offers.

● 02:56: – What is the impetus of Owl.co?

● 06:22: – How does Owl.co deal with the privacy issue?

● 10:04: – They break down how human biases can be phased out with Owl.co’s service.

● 13:03: – How do they go about educating the customer?

● 14:50: – Owl.co looks for supporting evidence and track a whole lifestyle.

● 16:02: – Jason talks about how the African lending market benefited from profiling based on behavior from their cell phone.

● 17:14: – You don’t want a computer to tell a human how to make decisions about data.

● 19:32: – There are still regulations that have to be applied.

● 20:05: – What are the modulations that people can opt into?

● 21:27: – Can they extrapolate knowledge from people’s data to use back in the machine learning engine?

● 23:02: – What have been the benchmark outcomes that Owl.co has experienced?

● 25:58: – How have banks and insurance companies been coping with regulations?

● 29:24: – How is Owl.co handling disability claims & fraud?

● 32:40: – If they could change anything in their company or industry, what would it be?

● 42:38: – What have been the biggest challenges to expanding Owl.co?

● 44:04: – What gets them the most excited about what Owl.co is accomplishing?


3 Key Points:

1. No one can see or restore any customer data with Owl.co...not even Owl.co.

2. In its first year, Owl.co is already servicing some of the biggest financial institutions in the world.

3. Disability claim fraud is a $280 billion problem.


Tweetable Quotes:

● “Owl is a modular data aggregator analyzer and its all about knowing your customers. So we connect to thousands of public and private databases in real time. And we only need very few inputs.’” – Vahid Mirjalili

● “When we look for markets, we look for markets that are highly regulated and we find a void.” – Sean Merat

● “Our software is very client-side heavy, so an analyst, when they are actually performing a search, a lot of the analysis is happening before it leaves their computer, even on their mobile devices.” – Sohrab Merat


Resources Mentioned:

● Facebook – Jason Pereira

● LinkedIn – Jason Pereira

● FintechImpact.co – Website

● Sean Merat – Linkedin

● Sohrab Merat – Website

● Vahid Mirjalili – Linkedin

● Owl.co – Website

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