Safety Detectives: Please share your company background, how you got started, and your mission.
WireSecure: WireSecure was founded in 2019 to address the increasing threats of wire fraud caused by impersonator fraud within private capital markets and M&A. The company’s frictionless solution ensures each participant or business identity’s financial information is digitally verified and protected. Its technology is designed to work seamlessly with existing email and portal systems, enabling users to continue conducting business in the way they know best. We are used by leading fund administrators and managers, private capital markets investors, and M&A shareholders.
The company was founded by Brian Twibell and Brian Starke, which lead a team that has decades of experience across finance and technology. Our combined knowledge and skillsets have resulted in next-generation technology to prevent impersonator fraud in private capital markets. Our technology employs biometric authentication to enable more secure transactions – and is designed to seamlessly integrate into existing portal systems so that users are not faced with yet another new piece of technology or system to learn (thereby reducing participation).
SD: What is the main service your company offers?
WireSecure: We create verification technology that adapts to the way LPs work, enabling our clients (which consist of private equity, venture capital, real estate firms, and more) to transfer large amounts of money without the risk of fraud or impersonation. Our technology employs multi-factor authentication, including biometric verification that is cross-checked with a government-issued ID and phone information to verify participants in a financial transaction. This information is easily available to each participant and cannot be forgotten, lost, faked, or compromised in the way a password can – thereby making it easier to use and more secure. What’s more, after one use, each participant’s identity is preserved for all future transactions.
In essence, we create irrefutable digital IDs—where identities have been validated and accounts are verified—so that exchanges can be conducted in a secure manner.
SD: What is something unique that helps you stay ahead of your competition?
WireSecure: What makes us unique is our commitment to safeguarding the methods of communication already being used by so many firms within the private capital markets. For example, while the issue of wire fraud is not necessarily new, other solutions in the market have included the creation of secure portals—which require login information, and if that login information is compromised, they are rendered useless. We are not advocating for GPs or LPs to conduct their daily business in a different way, rather, we support the use of email as long as it is made secure.
Our solution ensures the identity of each participant by using multi-factor authentication, and what’s more, once this is done, that person never has to go through the process again. Once they are verified, they are verified for all future transactions—making the solution as frictionless as possible.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
WireSecure: One of the biggest issues we are seeing now, which is largely not picked up in reporting around data breaches and phishing scams, is impersonation and social engineering. Among the financial losses that are reported every year, these often go unaccounted for as they can be hard to pinpoint as a specific cause. For example, we are seeing fraudsters take over someone’s email account, watch quietly for months at a time, learn how people interact, and then when the time is right, impersonate a victim and ask for funds to be redirected to a separate bank account. Once this happens, there is very little recourse.