Merian Chrysalis (MERI), the growth capital sector trust, has released a portfolio update, including a new investment in Featurespace, a leader in financial crime risk management for fraud and anti-money laundering.
Featurespace investment worth 20m
MERI has invested £20m in Featurespace, as part of a £30m funding round. MERI noted the following about Featurespace:
- “Featurespace is a world leader in financial crime risk management for fraud and anti-money laundering. Featurespace invented adaptive behavioural analytics and created the ARIC Risk Hub platform, which utilises real-time machine learning software that risk scores events in more than 180 countries to prevent fraud and financial crime.
- ARIC Risk Hub uses advanced, explainable anomaly detection to enable financial institutions to automatically identify risk, catch new fraud attacks and identify suspicious activity in real-time. This differs from most other fraud/AML systems that are based on discrete rules that are non-adaptive to emerging threats, and thus require continual retraining to ensure optimisation. More than 30 major global financial institutions are using ARIC Risk Hub to protect their business and customers, including four of the five largest banks in the UK. Customers include HSBC, TSYS, Worldpay, RBS NatWest Group, Contis, Danske Bank, ClearBank, Permanent TSB and Betfair.”
Completion of follow-on investments in Embark Group and Secret Escapes
MERI also confirmed that its follow-on investment of £12.2m (announced November 2019) has now completed, enabling Embark to close its acquisition of Sterling ISA Managers and Zurich Investment Services.
As part of a wider funding round, the MERI has also made a £2.6m follow-on investment in Secret Escapes. MERI says this funding will ensure the business is well placed to navigate the covid-19 environment and focus on long-term value generation.
MERI’s capital is now 88% invested
As a result of this morning’s announcements, MERI’s capital is approximately 88% invested.
Manager, Nick Williamson, noted: “MERI entered 2020 well capitalised. This position has given us the opportunity to invest in Featurespace, an asset we’ve been tracking for over a year, while preserving adequate flexibility to support our existing portfolio assets across a range of probable Covid-19 related trading scenarios. As well as being a tremendously exciting asset in its own right, Featurespace’s software model continues to diversify the portfolio’s thematic exposure, an ambition that we set out at IPO.”
MERI: Merian Chrysalis commits £20m to financial crime risk management company