Meet CleverChain.ai — A Demo Day 12 Presenting Startup

This year, Fintech Sandbox Demo Day will take place on Tuesday, April 28. The presentations will be virtual and the event, as always, is free. Demo Days are exciting because we get to showcase startups that are on the very cutting edge of innovation and you get to see what they’re up to before they’re discovered.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight this year’s presenting entrepreneurs. Today, we’re talking to Daniele Azzaro, Co-founder and CEO of London-based fintech CleverChain. CleverChain is a next-generation regtech platform that transforms compliance with AI-driven, real-time, global due diligence and automated risk intelligence. It empowers financial institutions to onboard faster, stay fully compliant, and eliminate manual work with unparalleled speed, accuracy, and scale. CleverChain was ranked 2nd in BusinessCloud’s RegTech 50 for 2025.

Daniele, tell us a bit about CleverChain. What problems are you solving?

CleverChain is a next-generation regtech platform that transforms how financial institutions perform business due diligence and manage compliance.

Today, compliance teams struggle with fragmented data, manual workflows, slow onboarding, and rising regulatory pressure.

We solve this by delivering AI-driven, real-time global due diligence and automated risk intelligence in a single click. Our technology enables institutions to onboard customers faster, stay continuously compliant, and eliminate huge amounts of manual work without sacrificing accuracy or regulatory confidence.

What is your company’s origin story?

CleverChain was born out of first-hand experience. My co-founders and I spent years building and operating compliance functions inside global financial institutions, and we repeatedly saw the same pain points: disconnected data sources, expensive tools that don’t talk to each other, and analysts wasting time stitching together information. We realized compliance needed a fundamental redesign one that treats data as real-time, connected, and intelligent. That insight became CleverChain.

What problems do financial institutions encounter with compliance data?

The biggest issues are fragmentation, latency, and trust. Data comes from dozens of vendors, arrives in different formats, updates at different speeds, and often conflicts. Teams must manually reconcile everything, which slows onboarding, increases cost, and creates risk. On top of that, regulators increasingly expect continuous monitoring rather than point-in-time checks. Financial institutions need unified, real-time, and auditable intelligence—not static reports.

What were you able to do with the data from the Data Partners you worked with?

We worked with Equifax during our time in the Data Access Residency to access high-quality datasets that allowed us to test, validate, and refine our AI models across global corporate, ownership, and risk data. This access has been invaluable in accelerating product development and strengthening our data orchestration capabilities.

What makes CleverChain different from other AML or KYB solutions?

Most AML and KYB tools focus on running checks. CleverChain focuses on delivering intelligence. We don’t just aggregate data – we normalize, link, and reason over it using AI. Our platform creates a real-time risk graph of companies and people, continuously updating as new information emerges. This means faster onboarding, fewer false positives, and a much richer understanding of risk. We’re also infrastructure-agnostic, so we plug into existing stacks rather than forcing replacement.

EY is a Fintech Sandbox sponsor. What was it like participating in the EY FinTech Growth Programme?

Working with EY through the FinTech Growth Programme was extremely valuable. We gained direct exposure to senior industry experts, refined our go-to-market strategy, and pressure-tested our product positioning with real financial institutions. The programme helped accelerate commercial conversations and sharpen our enterprise readiness.

Can you describe what it’s been like to be part of the Fintech Sandbox community?

It’s been an incredibly supportive and high-quality ecosystem. The community combines startups, data providers, and financial institutions in a way that’s genuinely collaborative. You get fast feedback, meaningful introductions, and access to resources that would normally take years to secure. It’s one of the most practical fintech communities we’ve been part of.

What milestones has CleverChain achieved so far?

We’ve earned the trust of major financial institutions and global enterprises, including top-tier banks and complex, highly regulated organizations across Europe. CleverChain has been recognized as Best KYB product by Chartis Research and ranked 2nd in BusinessCloud’s RegTech 50 for 2025.

More importantly, we’ve crossed a strategic threshold: moving beyond traditional AML and KYB tooling into a new category of autonomous, intelligence-led compliance. Customers are using CleverChain not just to run checks, but to fundamentally change how risk decisions are made—faster, continuously, and at enterprise scale.

What’s next for CleverChain?

We’re building toward a world where compliance operates itself. Our next phase is about delivering fully automated, continuously running risk control—where AI agents monitor, investigate, and resolve risk in real time across customers, counterparties, and transactions.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

To hear more about CleverChain and five additional exciting fintech startups, be sure to register for Fintech Sandbox Demo Day 12!