In an interview with Insights Success, John Colthart, General Manager, Audit & Assurance and VP Growth of MindBridge Ai, shares his resourceful insights over MindBridge Ai’s journey, its products, and the motive of the organization to revolutionize the world’s financial transactions.
Highlights of the interview, between John and Insights Success, are elaborated as follows:
Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness and its vision.
MindBridge Ai is a venture-backed Fintech company based in Ottawa, Canada. Through the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies, our platform detects anomalous patterns of activities, unintentional errors, and intentional misstatements. Using our Ai Auditor platform, organizations can minimize financial loss, reduce corporate liability and focus on providing higher value services to their clients.
A recent paper authored by the ACFE estimates nearly $4 trillion is lost annually due to human error or intent in financial data. We are on a mission to uncover any and all anomalies that are leading to this loss.
What are the cutting-edge products/solutions offered by MindBridge Ai?
Ai Auditor is the first point solution developed on our platform, released in 2017, we’ve on-boarded over 175 customers to date. Within minutes, an auditor can review trends, anomalies and risk-scored transactions, enhancing their judgment and reducing risk while empowering them to deliver AI driven insights to clients. This is a world’s first in audit, the use of AI combined with traditional analytics with 100% transaction analysis. We provide razor-sharp focus on potential issues, ensuring confidence that they didn’t miss any material miss-statements.
Our platform is solving problems in many industries or regulatory environments. Recently the Bank of England published observations on our second project with them. Our extensible platform is poised to tackle an unlimited number of markets.
Tell us a little about your role at MindBridge Ai and what do you see in the future for audit?
My responsibility is to guide Sales, Marketing, Product Management and Success. This means that all our market offerings and processes are led by me, and that I am responsible for all revenue generation for the firm. Coming from a multi-disciplined background that includes technical sales, consulting, product marketing, design and even dabbling in coding allows for a broad perspective on tuning MindBridge Ai’s business.
While the industry is striving to understand its future and what the “firm of the future” looks like, I have dialogue at leading industry events talking about the future – from process, technology and even a career perspective. The auditor of the future will be very analytics and design oriented, with the necessary accounting depths, focusing on value creation for clients while moving audit to a more continuously offered service.
Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of the company.
How do you reshape an industry that is thousands of years old? That’s what we’re talking about with regards to the accounting profession; even audit specifically is younger but still 700+ years old. Challenges are abundant when leading professionals on a transformative journey, powering them to assess more data than ever, all powered with new technology like AI to identify risk.
We are also challenging the 40-year old Computer Assisted Audit Techniques and Tools, while pushing the envelope on the interpretation of audit standards on how to use new technologies that simply weren’t available when some of them were written.
We’ve learned a tremendous amount from our clients, it truly is a partnership. We must also leverage and learn from the half a billion data transactions that we have analyzed to date.
We’ve been the recipient of numerous awards, from Top New Product of 2018 by Accounting Today Magazine, to winning the Central Banking FinTech and RegTech Global Award for Best Machine Learning Solution for Regulatory Compliance.
What are the challenges faced while providing innovative solutions and how is MindBridge Ai serving to tackle them?
We continue to enrich our AI platform by collaborating with clients on new and interesting data problems; ultimately creating new algorithms and new ways tune our analysis components to drive newly discovered value to our clients and theirs. More data and more complexity is coming, this will continue to be a challenge that the MindBridge Ai team will continue to battle, and win.
What according to you could be the potential future of your relative industry and how does MindBridge Ai envision sustaining its competency?
We envision that Audit and Assurance will be drastically different than it is today; the firms of the future will be analytics and AI-enabled, creating new offerings to unlock potential for clients. Audit will still be a function at these firms but there could be a future where the corporation itself will analyze 100% of the data in their ERP systems and external audit will do a deeper review into other systems of the business, say the CRM system, and tie that into analysis. MindBridge Ai will continue to lead the space, driving deeper audit data analytics, including more sources, while leveraging thousands of engagements to update algorithms, ultimately bridging more gaps used to assess the health of the organization.
Client Testimonials
“For the first time in 25 years, I knew I had a relevant sample.” – Samantha Bowling, Audit Partner, Garbelman Winslow (GWCPAs)
“The best way to find a needle in a haystack is to burn the haystack. MindBridge is the lighter.” – Jonathan Kraftchick, Managing Director of Training & Development, Audit & Assurance at Cherry Bekaert LLP
URL: mindbridge.ai
Source: The 10 Start-Ups with Innovative Solutions in 2018
MindBridge
