A Chat with Baran Ozkan, Co-Founder & CEO at Payment Trust Infrastructure: Flagright

“At Flagright we are rebuilding financial crime prevention as a real-time decision infrastructure for the entire fintech and banking ecosystem.”

Tell us about Flagright

I describe Flagright as trust infrastructure for modern payments. When money moves instantly across borders, cards and wallets, risk also moves instantly. Many financial institutions are still trying to manage that risk with tools that were designed for slower, simpler systems. You end up with huge alert queues, frustrated compliance teams and a constant sense that something important might be slipping through the cracks.

Flagright unifies monitoring, case management and investigations on one platform so that you can make high quality decisions at the speed of your customers. We focus on helping fintechs and banks detect suspicious behaviour, investigate it efficiently and demonstrate a strong control environment to regulators and partners. My simple test is this: after deploying us, can the risk team explain what is happening in their business with more clarity than before? If the answer is yes, then we are doing our job.

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

I started Flagright because I wanted to build something I would actually want to buy myself. For about a year and a half I was searching for a real-time, risk-based transaction monitoring solution, and I kept running into the same problem. The usual vendors in the market sounded great in demos, but in practice they overpromised and underdelivered.

That gap pushed me to stop looking and start building. I teamed up with Madhu Nadig, a former teammate of mine and an expert in building scalable, data intensive systems. We built the first version quickly, started serving our first customers early, and within six months we had traction across three continents. That early pull from real teams dealing with real risk confirmed we were solving a problem that was both urgent and global.

Tell us about your core product or service

Flagright is a single platform for financial crime prevention, with risk-based transaction monitoring and case management at its core. In practical terms that means we ingest transaction and customer data, evaluate risk in real-time, and then provide the workflows that teams use to review and resolve alerts.

Two principles guide how we build. The first is explainability. In highly regulated environments it is not enough to be right occasionally. You have to understand why a decision was made, who touched it and how it has changed over time. We invest heavily in making sure teams can trace decisions, adjust controls and respond confidently to audits.

The second principle is usability. Many compliance tools are powerful on paper but painful to operate. If your analysts need to open ten tabs to understand a single customer, the tool is failing. We spend a lot of time with frontline teams to keep the product practical and opinionated, not just flexible.

What most excites you about the fintech industry?

What excites me is that fintech is no longer a sidecar to traditional finance. It is becoming the primary distribution layer for financial services. That creates amazing possibilities for inclusion and innovation, but it also creates new responsibilities. When a small team can move billions in volume across markets, the quality of their risk infrastructure matters enormously.

The rate of experimentation is especially interesting. New business models appear every year. That forces everyone involved to think more deeply about how we define risk and how we share information. I do not believe a single institution can solve financial crime in isolation. The next chapter for fintech will involve more collaboration around typologies, data sharing frameworks and collective defence.

What has been the biggest challenge you have had to overcome along the way?

One of the biggest challenges has been focus. When you build infrastructure, you constantly receive requests to cover one more use case, integrate one more data source or add one more feature. It can be tempting to say yes to everything, especially when clients are asking in good faith.

The discipline is to remember what problem you exist to solve. For us that problem is helping financial institutions make better, faster and more defensible risk decisions. When a feature does not clearly support that, we have to be comfortable saying no or not yet. That is difficult in the moment but it keeps the product coherent and the company healthy.

Another challenge is hiring. Financial crime prevention sits at the intersection of regulation, data and engineering. It is not enough to be strong in just one of those dimensions. We look for people who are curious about how systems actually behave in the real world and who are comfortable with long feedback loops. Finding and retaining that mix of skills takes time and deliberate effort.

What is your number one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Stop obsessing over ideas and focus on problems that are durable. Markets will change, features will change and you will pivot more than you expect. If you anchor yourself to a narrow solution too early, you reduce your own ability to learn.

Pick a problem you are willing to stay close to for many years and talk to the people who live that problem every day. Build something small that is genuinely useful to them and then iterate. The compound effect of listening carefully, shipping consistently and taking responsibility for outcomes is far more powerful than any single breakthrough insight.

Also, be honest with yourself about the cost of context switching. Every time you chase a new trend you incur a hidden tax. Depth is underrated.

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

The simple answer is that we want to become the default choice for fintechs and banks that take financial crime prevention seriously. That means continuously improving our detection capabilities, making investigations more efficient and strengthening the governance tooling that sits around all of it.

Looking ahead I am especially interested in how we can help financial institutions move from reactive work to proactive risk management. A lot of teams still spend most of their time clearing alerts. I want Flagright to be the partner that helps them ask better questions about their business, their customers and their exposure and then act on the answers.

If we do our job well, the impact will not only be cleaner operations for our customers. It will be a financial system where bad actors find it progressively harder to hide, while good customers experience less friction. That is a future worth working towards.