Singapore’s Jewel Paymentech scores $1m series A funding

Impressive ecommerce growth spells nothing but good news to merchants, but it’s sometimes a headache for a lot of banks. That’s because if a merchant sells counterfeit goods, the bank gets swamped with complaints from consumers demanding their money back, or pays regulatory fines to intellectual property owners.

One company addressing this problem is Singapore’s Jewel Paymentech. Today, Jewel announced it has snapped up over S$1.5 million (US$1 million) in series A funding. Tuas Capital Partners led the round, while institutional and private investors, including Singapore-based investment partnership 8capita, participated.

Jewel Paymentech offers solutions to help banks and payment facilitators conduct merchant due diligence and manage fraud risks using predictive analytics. It also provides automated solutions to marketplaces to identify merchants who sell illegal and counterfeit goods as part of their know-your-customer process.

“Our vision is to make the epayments ecosystem safer, not just for consumers and merchants, but also for merchant acquirers, who often bear the brunt of the problem,” says founder and CEO Sean Lam, who has experience in this sector.

Sean was formerly the director of fraud and security risk at Visa (Southeast Asia), and was also with PricewaterhouseCooper as a security and technology consultant.

Sean says they will use the money they just raised to expand Jewel’s team of developers, data scientists, and business development managers as the company’s client portfolio continues to grow across Asia. They will also spend it to roll out new solutions in payments. One solution set for launch is a fraud detection router that conducts real-time fraud risk analytics without the need for complex architectural and core banking system changes.