Interview with Liudas Kanapienis, CEO at Ondato

Ondato helps turn compliance into a business benefit used not only by financial institutions, but also by other businesses that need to know their customers.

After starting with the most obvious field – customer onboarding and ID verification – Ondato has since become a platform for compliance solutions. The team continue to move forward with their vision of making compliance part of a simple and understandable business process that makes it easy to onboard a customer, manage and update customer information, report to a regulator, and simply engage in business activities.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Working in a financial institution, myself and Andrej Vištorskij dealt with constantly evolving, strict supervisory requirements. We realised that AML and KYC compliance are becoming a major challenge for the development and growth of a financial institution.

The focus in finance is on meeting these requirements, rather than attracting new clients, growing, or selling. With the experience and know-how, we decided to create a solution that would help to turn compliance into a business benefit, and one that could be used not only by financial institutions but also by other businesses that need to know their customer. And so, Ondato was born.

Starting with customer onboarding and ID verification, we did not stop there and created more compliance solutions. Along with our team, we continue to move forward with our vision of making compliance part of a simple and understandable business process that makes it easier to onboard a customer, manage and update customer information, report to the regulator, and simply engage in direct activities.

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

Success is a team effort. Gather a group of people who share your vision, have passion for building something unique. It’s extremely important to choose the right investor. A VC partner who can support you locally, has experience in helping Founders in scaling the business internationally, and networks to open the right doors at the right time, is a very important component to the overall success.

Hiring top talent is a prerequisite to building exceptional products and scale the business while partnering with the right VC firm helps aspiring leaders avoid many pitfalls and supercharge that growth. Choose carefully, because those people will determine your success, or lack of it.

What can we hope to see from Ondato in the future?

The ongoing pandemic, the increasing pace of regulatory change as well as rising costs of compliance have made the traditional approach to KYC or KYB too burdensome and not financially viable or scalable enough anymore. Especially that the demand for identity verification, monitoring and compliance automation solutions will continue to increase dramatically. Ondato helps its customers to address these challenges with its unique end-to-end authentication and compliance management suite.

The company is able to operate in any jurisdiction and is well positioned to continue its dynamic growth and significantly increase its global footprint in near future. We are confident in the team, and their innovative solutions.