40 Monday May 23 2022 | the times
Business
Vishal Marria had his first encounter
with crooks when he was only nine
years old, when thieves tried to raid
his family’s cash-and-carry business in
south London. “I was cleaning my
dad’s car and these guys came with
knives and bottles. The secure doors
went up, but I was trapped outside. I
ran away, but they got me and put adrowsy, and then pitching to banks.
Doing your own thing, with nothing
behind you, the buck stops with you. In
the first year I had 35 employees, that’s
35 families on this journey. That was on
my mind all the time.”
He estimated that at one point he was
down £800,0000 in the venture, made
up of lost earnings and savings he had
invested to get the company started. His
position looks rather better now: the
company raised $153 million last July at
a valuation of close to $900 million, just
shy of the symbolic $1 billion of so-
called unicorn private companies.
Backers include Warburg Pincus, the
private equity firm, Dawn Capital, a
venture capital investor, and HSBC.
According to filings, Marria owns
about 15 per cent of the company. He
says that he has enough “gas in the
tank” to get to a flotation or a trade sale,
but would consider raising further
funds to grow more quickly. He expects
Quantexa to have about 900 staff by
next year.
“I’d have been amazed if you told me
in 2016 that in six years I’m gonna go
through Brexit, a pandemic, war and
still I’m going to grow this company by
over 100 per cent a year. Now my
challenges are different to ‘Have I got
enough money to make year one?’ Now,
it’s ‘How do we make this a $5 billion
company?’ ”TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER RICHARD POHLEVishal Marria says every institution is sitting on a “goldmine” of valuable data
Quantexa puts the battle
against crime into context
knife to my neck.” Marria was rescued
by his father.
Thirty years on, he still has his eyes
out for criminals, albeit of a more
sophisticated sort. Quantexa, his
software company, is being used by the
government to help to investigate fraud
on the £47 billion bounce back loan
scheme; by banks for purposes such as
anti-money-laundering compliance;
and by telecoms providers and others
that want to have a more informed view
of their customers.
One of Britain’s fastest-growing
technology businesses, Quantexa aims
to connect and interpret data from a
variety of sources to provide “true single
views” of individuals or businesses.
“Every institution is sitting on a gold-
mine of data that it could draw on to
make better decisions,” is the pitch.
It appears to be working. What began
in a small room in 2016 with half-a-
dozen people crowded around three
desks now employs 500 staff and has
8,000 users across more than 60
organisations, including HSBC, the
global bank, which uses the software to
process abut 60 billion records a day.
Marria had the idea for the business
while working for EY, the Big Four
accounting group, when he was
seconded to banking clients. He saw
them making bad decisions and costly
mistakes because they were trying to
manually stitch together “siloed data”
held in different places — for instance,
in different parts of the bank and
external sources such as Companies
House, credit rating agencies or
sanctions lists. “They wouldn’t even
know if they were looking at the same
customer, if one Vishal Marria is a good
customer of the bank and another
Vishal Marria is a known money
launderer.”
The software essentially provides
what it claims is a new way to connect
data to improve the quality of decisions.
Such “entity resolution” allows users,
say, to spot fraudsters who may have
recorded different dates of birth or
variations of their name in different
places.
According to Marria: “When you buy
a house or rent a flat, you don’t look at
one data element, you look at what are
neighbouring properties like, what is
the crime rate of the area, how far is the
coffee shop, are the schools any good.
That’s context. It allows you to make
better decisions.”
Quantexa also helps clients to answer
questions such as how much business
they want to do with a particular
customer and to clean up errors in data-
bases. “Government, banking, insur-
ance, telecommunication are the four
sectors that I’ve proactively gone out to
invest in, Marria said, “but there are so
many other sectors. You could be apply-
ing this to oil and gas, manufacturing,
energy, pharmaceuticals, healthcare.”
He decided to take the leap and quit
his executive director role at EY while
attending an anti-money-laundering
conference in Las Vegas. “There was a
lady there pitching me this really poor
tech, but her energy, enthusiasm,
smartness, passion about the product
— I thought, ‘Why can’t that be me, but
pitching something that is relevant?’
That night I called my wife and said, ‘I
want to do this.’ The reaction I got was,
‘Do it.’ ”
The first 18 months were a slog and as
prospective clients dragged their feet
over whether to sign up, Marria devel-
oped hives from the stress, a skin condi-
tion that disappeared only when he
secured a deal with HSBC. “I was taking
[antihistamines] which make youJames Hurley‘Fraud was
inevitable’
Behind the story
I
f Lord Agnew of Oulton had
his way, the government
would be putting more
business Quantexa’s way
(James Hurley writes). The
former counter-fraud minister,
who resigned at the dispatch box
in January over alleged oversight
failures in the bounce back
scheme, was impressed with the
software when it was used by a
team in the Cabinet Office. He
wanted greater use of it by other
departments to help to spot
bounce back fraudsters, who are
estimated to have stolen about
£4 billion from the emergency
scheme.
The business has been helping
the government to understand
“how big and how bad” fraud on
the scheme might be, according
to Vishal Marria, its founder
and chief executive, but he won’t
be drawn on whether he agrees
with Agnew’s assessment that
“schoolboy errors” were made in
the oversight of programme.
“When the government came
out with [the scheme] it was
fantastic. We can debate whether
there should have been better
controls, could technology like
Quantexa have saved billions of
pounds wasted, but at that point
in time you had to get the money
out quickly to save the good
businesses and fraud was
inevitable.
“You can always do more to
bring these criminals to justice
and there’s a process for the
government to go through. It
can’t be done on a whim. I
applaud the process, but we just
need to get on with it.”