90. Tunic Pay: fighting financial fraud with real-time payment protection

Founder: Nicky Goulimis and Nico Barawid
Year founded: 2023
Website: tunicpay.com

We encounter scams almost everyday, be it receiving phishing messages from people pretending to be your bank, or junk emails saying we’re owed money. It’s a tricky field to navigate. Some of these messages are so convincing, it’s hard to know what is and isn’t real.

Enter anti-scam superhero Tunic Pay, a trust infrastructure for banks and fintechs that’s hoping to protect real-time payments for their customers. It aims to do so by validating the recipient of a bank transaction, not just the sender, taking a multi-layered approach to scam prevention.

This is fixing a real issue with real-time online payments which, while an amazing tool for financial inclusion, come with none of the protections afforded to cards like disputes or chargebacks.

My old customers from my previous role as chief risk officer at a startup kept talking to me about how they are able to solve scams when it's between their own customers, but not when it goes outside their purview,

It’s an issue the founders knew well. “My old customers from my previous role as chief risk officer at a startup kept talking to me about how they are able to solve scams when it’s between their own customers, but not when it goes outside their purview,” explains cofounder Nicky Goulimis. “The idea of recipient intelligence and the mutual exchange of data was born.”

Tunic Pay’s biggest challenge has been selling to banks and the cold start of building a consortium, but the cofounders have cleverly circumvented this by building a one-sided solution using consumer case studies to prove out their value proposition.

Within the sector, recognition has come in terms of both cash and clientele. Tunic Pay’s biggest backer is LocalGlobe as well as various venture capitalists including Avid, Box Group, Point72 and Flourish. Clients include national banks and fintechs, all of whom have bought into the potential of Tunic Pay’s platform.

In the past year, Goulimis says she is “super proud” of getting deployed in a banking call centre for one of its largest partners, trying to help customers in their most trying moments and supporting the fraud colleagues who are doing their best to resolve issues.

Longer term, the cofounders’ ambitions are to develop the Tunic Pay platform and expand the business cross-border. It could also work across payment rails like wire fraud and check fraud.

Scams accounted for 40% of all financial crime in the UK, and being a victim of one is devastating. We at Startups love Tunic Pay’s approach to helping banks to protect real-time payments for their customers, giving them peace of mind (and scammers, a piece of their mind).