OxIgnite Ep4: Steven Renwick, Tilores
Learn how Tilores helps fraud prevention, KYC & AML teams at FinTech & E-Commerce companies improve fraud prevention, data quality and customer retention with its no-code identity resolution platform
Welcome to the OxIgnite Podcast hosted by Yusuf Raza and Michael Hutson - two entrepreneurial MBA students at the University of Oxford. Together, we navigate the dynamic journeys of Oxford-linked founders, venture capitalists, and trailblazing innovators. Our mission? To fuel the fire in Oxford's next generation of boundary-pushing change-makers.
Our fourth guest is Steven Renwick, Co-Founder and CEO of Tilores.
Tilores is a Berlin-based startup which provides a no-code identity resolution platform to facilitate data orchestration for fraud prevention, KYC & AML teams at FinTech and eCommerce companies.
Tilores' high-performance Entity Resolution as a Service technology deduplicates and links customer data in real-time to uncover the hidden relationships between transactions, allowing its customers to significantly improve fraud prevention, data quality and customer retention.
Get a quick glimpse into the technology behind Tilores that is quickly leading it to become a preferred choice over existing solutions for prominent e-commerce and FinTech players.
With a diverse background spanning genetics, biochemistry, FinTech and multiple entrepreneurial ventures, Steven’s journey is as fascinating as it is unique.
As we delve into Steven's entrepreneurship journey leading up to founding Tilores, his advice to aspiring entrepreneurs, and his thoughts on maintaining mental wellness, be prepared for a richly informative conversation that combines tech innovation, startup lessons, and personal growth.
Whether you're an entrepreneur, a data scientist, or just someone intrigued by the dynamic tech landscape, this episode promises valuable insights for everyone.
Get ready, get set, get OxIgnited!
List of topics covered:
Steven Renwick’s Career Trajectory: From Biochemistry to online businesses.
Steven’s Rocket Internet Experience: Focused, data-driven approach.
Steven’s First Venture Satago's Inception: Tackling B2B late payments.
Satago's Evolution: Becoming an invoice finance platform.
Entrepreneur First Takeaways: Importance of customer validation and knowing when to drop an idea.
Switch to Regis24: From entrepreneur to Chief Product Officer at a consumer credit bureau.
Realization at Regis24: Identified a need for identity resolution tech.
Tilores' Birth: Spinning off from Regis24, becoming venture-funded.
Tilores' Tech: No-Code Identity Resolution platform, High-Performance Entity Resolution as a Service, Real-time deduplication and linkage of customer data
Success Case: Mitigated fraud for a European e-commerce giant.
Tilores' Vision: Bringing order to data chaos and planning for seed investment.
Entrepreneur Advice: Advocates bootstrapping, no code development, idea validation.
Steven's Approach to Wellness: Emphasize sports, diet, mindfulness.
Berlin Life: Observing the city's tech growth and Rocket Internet's influence.
Summary:
Steven Renwick is the CEO of Tilores, a Berlin-based startup that helps FinTech and eCommerce companies improve fraud prevention, data quality and customer retention by identifying and rectifying duplicate or inconsistent data in their databases with its high-performance Entity Resolution as a Service technology.
Tilores primarily involves solving issues of duplicate and disconnected customer data.
This problem commonly exists in e-commerce shops with large customer bases, where duplicate customer accounts can be created either due to user forgetfulness or fraudulent activities.
Tilores identifies these duplicates in real-time and links the data, resulting in higher quality data for the companies.
By identifying duplicate accounts in real-time, Tilores enhances data quality for companies, aiding in fraud prevention, and supporting measurements of customer loyalty and retention strategies.
Before founding Tilores, Steven initially pursued a career in biochemistry and genetics, which later led him to work in the pharmaceutical sector.
His experience in a consultancy selling database technologies sparked his interest in internet businesses, prompting him to complete an MBA from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford to facilitate a career change.
He joined Rocket Internet after completing his MBA and later started his own startup, Satago.
Speaking about his time at Rocket Internet, Steven highlights the company's focus on quantitatively-driven execution, which made it very successful.
However, he also mentions his belief that businesses that are started purely as execution plays tend to lack a "soul" and opines that the most successful businesses are usually those founded by individuals who are genuinely connected to the startup's mission.
Steven's first venture, Satago, was conceived with the aim of solving late payments for B2B companies, a prevalent issue in the UK that often leads to significant cash flow problems for small businesses.
The idea was to build real-time credit reports focusing on payment behavior rather than credit worthiness.
Steven notes that while his initial ideas were sound, he made mistakes in terms of positioning and customer targeting.
Reflecting on his time with Entrepreneur First, Steven appreciates their emphasis on idea validation.
He shares his experience of trying to build a mathematical model of the immune system to test drugs on.
While it received positive feedback from the pharmaceutical industry, he ultimately concluded the idea was overly ambitious and not feasible, leading to the decision to withdraw from the venture.
Steven Renwick's journey led him to his role as Chief Product Officer at Regis24 after his stint at entrepreneurship and not due to any particular strategic plan, but more out of the necessity to stabilize his financial situation.
He was attracted to Regis24 because of its need for an entrepreneurial and unconventional figure, the opportunity to work with consumer credit data, and a chance to work in German, offering him a language challenge.
Additionally, he found the need for strategic innovation and the technical capabilities of the company intriguing.
At Regis24, Steven found adjusting to not being in charge somewhat challenging and was struck by imposter syndrome.
His entrepreneurial instincts kicked in when he noticed that the credit bureau was sitting on vast amounts of data but lacked a suitable technology to manage and connect it.
This led to the creation of an in-house solution for entity resolution or data deduplication and connecting, a space that Steven recognized had immense market potential.
As the COVID pandemic drew to an end, he suggested to the shareholders that the technology they had developed could have applications beyond the credit bureau, potentially being sold directly.
This led to the birth of Tilores, a venture-funded startup as opposed to Regis24, which had been bootstrapped with some angel investment.
The technology that powers Tilores operates on AWS, specifically AWS's serverless stack.
It connects to customer systems via API, ingesting individual data records as they're created.
It can instantly cross-reference new data with existing data in Tilores, searching for potential matches and drawing connections between similar records, forming identity graphs.
This ability to unify disparate data records in real-time sets Tellurus apart from similar systems that operate on a batch basis.
Tilores is especially beneficial for risk and fraud engineering teams, e-commerce fraud prevention, credit risk analysis, and FinTech compliance.
It helps these entities navigate the data swamps that many companies inadvertently create, where data is extensive but unorganized and, therefore, underutilized.
Steven highlighted a case study with a large European buy-now-pay-later e-commerce firm, where Tilores identified both known and previously unknown fraud networks.
By identifying previously unknown connections between customers, Tilores was able to detect hundreds of thousands of euros worth of fraud the company was unaware of.
This led to a compelling business case for Tilores, as the company calculated that for every euro spent on Tilores, they would save 50 euros in fraud losses.
The system’s ease of use, scalability, and cost-effectiveness led the firm to begin the process of replacing Elasticsearch with Tilores for fraud prevention.
**Side Note - I asked ChatGPT-4 how Tilores is better than Elasticsearch for its target use cases and got the following back as an answer: Elasticsearch is an open-source, full-text search engine. It's a powerful tool for indexing and querying large amounts of data quickly. However, it's not specifically designed for the task of entity resolution. In contrast, Tilores is built with this particular focus, giving it several advantages over Elasticsearch in that context. Here's a brief comparison:Real-time data ingestion: Unlike Elasticsearch, which typically operates on a batch processing basis, Tilores can ingest and process data in real time. As soon as a new data record is created in a customer's system, Tilores can import it and instantly compare it against existing records to identify potential matches. This allows Tilores to keep data more up-to-date and reduce latency.Efficient fuzzy matching: Tilores employs a rule-based system for "fuzzy" data matching, a process which considers variations and potential inaccuracies in data (such as different spellings of a name) when looking for matches. This capability enables Tilores to be more accurate in entity resolution, especially when dealing with inconsistent or imperfect data.Scalability and performance: Because Tilores is built on AWS's serverless stack, it can automatically scale up or down to handle varying amounts of data. This gives it an edge in performance, as it can maintain rapid response times (retrieving data in 150 milliseconds, no matter how complex the identity graphs) even when processing large amounts of data. Elasticsearch, on the other hand, can be more challenging to scale and might require significant manual configuration.Entity graphs: Tilores specifically creates identity graphs, connecting all individual records about a person into a single entity. This is an advantage for tasks like fraud prevention, risk analysis, and compliance, where understanding the entirety of an entity’s data is crucial. Elasticsearch doesn't inherently offer this level of entity resolution.Maintenance and management: Tilores, being a fully managed service, requires no maintenance from the customer's side, and scales automatically, easing the load on an organization's IT resources. On the other hand, maintaining Elasticsearch requires more effort, including managing server resources, fine-tuning for performance, and ensuring data security.So, in the context of entity resolution, Tilores provides advantages over Elasticsearch in terms of speed, accuracy, scalability, and ease of use. However, it's worth noting that each tool has its own strengths and ideal use cases. Elasticsearch remains a powerful solution for many other data search and analysis tasks.As for Tilores' future, Steven envisions the company as a leader in bringing order to data chaos.
They're still in their early stages, trying to establish a go-to-market strategy and identify their ideal customer profile.
Looking towards the end of the year or early next year, Steven aims to raise seed investment to help scale their operations.
Finally, reflecting on his entrepreneurial journey, Steven shares some advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
He recommends a more rigorous scientific approach, including setting hypotheses and measuring the results, particularly in areas that are easily measurable.
He also suggests new entrepreneurs should validate their ideas through customer interviews before building a prototype.
Furthermore, he advocates for leveraging no-code tools for developing viable web applications and delaying venture capital funding until it's absolutely necessary for significant growth, as he sees significant value in bootstrapping, a method proven by many successful companies.
When discussing mental wellness and stress management, Steven emphasizes the importance of regular physical exercise.
He shares his personal experience with rowing, which he took up during his time at Oxford University.
Regular workouts on the rowing machine, he suggests, have been instrumental in reducing his stress levels.
He also mentions the importance of maintaining a balanced diet and drinking moderately, acknowledging that stress can have physical effects that may go unnoticed until they've already caused damage.
Moving to the topic of his relocation from the UK to Germany, Steven explains that the decision was driven by admiration for his internationally diverse colleagues and a desire to become bilingual.
His opportunity to move came when he was offered a job at Rocket Internet's HQ in Berlin.
After 11 years, he has integrated well into the German lifestyle, although he admits his German language skills have plateaued due to working primarily in English.
He has also gained dual nationality, making him "Brexit-proof."
Steven shares his observations on the evolution of the tech scene in Berlin, driven initially by Rocket Internet.
He notes that many successful Berlin startups have ties to Rocket Internet, either through their founders or senior team members. He estimates that around half of the successful tech companies in Berlin have some connection to Rocket.
When asked about language requirements in the Berlin tech world, Steven confirms that the entire sector operates in English, eliminating the need for proficiency in German.
Steven Renwick can be reached via his email, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
* Links shared below
Links:
Tilores Official Website: https://tilores.io/
Steven Renwick LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenrenwick/
Steven Renwick Email ( Personal): steven.renwick@gmail.com
Steven Renwick Twitter: @major_grooves
Yusuf Raza LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yusurfaza/
Michael Hutson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hutsonmichael/
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