Taavi Tamkivi is founder and chief executive of Salv, the Estonian company that sells collaborative anti-money-laundering and fraud software to banks and fintechs. He built AML, fraud, and KYC teams at Wise and earlier fought e-commerce fraud at Skype, then started Salv in 2018 because he thought financial institutions still fought crime in silos.
Skype and Wise
He studied mathematics and statistics and left a machine-learning PhD when Skype recruited him as a data analyst in the mid-2000s. There he worked on large datasets of payments and calls to spot fraud and account takeovers in real time as Skype scaled into a European unicorn. He later joined TransferWise, now Wise, to build compliance operations and products across the dozens of countries where the company needed to meet AML and regulatory expectations, covering fraud as well as formal compliance.
Founding Salv
He founded Salv with Jeff McClelland and Sergei Rumjantsev to turn that operating experience into SaaS that helps institutions stop crime while staying compliant and keeping customers moving. TechCrunch covered a $2 million seed in 2019 for the ex-TransferWise team. Tamkivi has argued that criminals collaborate while banks historically did not, and that Salv's network approach exists to close that gap.
"In the past, crime fighters have often sat in silos and financial institutions have not really worked together, like criminals do," he told TechFinitive. He has cited a case where banks on the platform shared data and helped return 50,000 euros to a victim of an authorised push-payment scam.