Patrick Johnson
Veriff is thrilled to welcome Amish Mody, who has joined as our new Chief Financial Officer. He brings a wealth of know-how and experience to our team and is excited to help us continue our rapid growth in a scalable and sustainable way.
Before joining Veriff, Amish spent 5+ years in Monese as VP of Finance, responsible for the accounting, financial planning and analysis, business intelligence and treasury functions. Prior to that he had 10 years experience as an investment banker, working on mergers and acquisition, capital raising and strategic advisory projects in Central and Eastern Europe.
I spoke to Amish about his experiences in Monese, what excited him about the prospect of joining Veriff, and what’s first up for him to tackle in his new role.
Amish, you’re coming to Veriff from Monese, and with a lot of experience in finance in your career, what inspired the move into the identity verification sector?
I’ve seen identity verification so much from the client side in my previous workplace, and how critical IDV is to businesses. I’ve also seen the rapid digitisation of IDV, moving away from offline, face-to-face verification. It’s so important to get it right, to offer verification which is fast with an excellent response time with equally good quality.
The market is also growing rapidly, and there are so many industries who need these services, beyond the traditional ones like financial services. It excited me to be in a growing and critical market, to be part of that.
The other reason, the ‘why Veriff?’, was that in my conversations with Kaarel, Janer, Indrek, and other key managers, it was wonderful to see the energy and enthusiasm they have for this product. So aside from the industry, it was obvious Veriff has a wonderful team of people, who’ll work together to grow Veriff in it’s next phase.
Do you feel there’s any specific piece of insight you’ll bring with you from Monese that you learned from being on the side of the client?
The understanding of how mission critical identity verification is, and how important it is for clients that we get it right. It’s technically quite a challenge to integrate a new partner in this way - maybe not on the product side but for clients - the simpler we can make this process the better. And perhaps more pertinently, I know how important the financial aspect is to clients, when we talk about pricing, product or payment terms, I’ve seen what’s considered in the decision process.
And what was the history between yourself and Veriff? How much did you know previously?
I’d met Kaarel previously, during earlier fundraising for Veriff. Estonia is a small community and I’m good friends with a few investors in Veriff anyway, so I had a fair understanding of the company earlier.
Was there anything else that attracted you to join the company?
In my previous workplace, we’d actually been through a lot of the experiences that Veriff is now facing. We’d raised several rounds of financing, grew the organisation multiple times, and brought the financial side to a mature state. So I feel bringing that knowledge, and the positive steps we took on that journey (and perhaps learning from the missteps) was appealing.
The existing finance team in Veriff is already very good and has laid a fantastic foundation, but the function hasn’t been an overall priority in the company before. This is completely understandable, product is the key focus and should be, but in order to grow and scale you need to shift some of that focus on to the financial and operational scalability. It’s exciting to me to come here and challenge myself, and see if the knowledge I’ve gained can help Veriff to continue growing.
You spoke a little about fundraising, as you’ve experienced it a lot previously, what’s the work that needs to go in when you’re raising investment for your company?
It’s mostly about taking the good traction that a company already has, and putting this into an understandable framework for investors. The product isn’t the only thing that excites investors, it’s also crucially the unit economics and finding the sustainable balance of growth and burn.
Finally, what’s in your in-tray as you start work with Veriff? What are the priorities?
For me, it’s growing the finance team to strengthen what is already a great base. Beyond the standard accounting functions, it needs to support the growth of the company, more on a planning and analysis side in both management and departmental levels.
I’d also like to strengthen the thinking behind commercial and financial data, to bring it forward and more into focus, to better define the key KPIs and how we can track them regularly in the future. Implementing tools and processes that enable Veriff to grow and scale isn’t an overnight job, some of it will likely take a year or more to implement, but we’re in a great position to start working on it.
Interested in a career with Veriff? Click here to learn more.
