For firms in regulated industries, a single transaction can mean verifying a client, running anti-money laundering checks, collecting documents, getting them signed, and handling client money. Each sits in a separate system that was never designed to talk to the next. Every handover is a delay, and every delay is a point of risk. In property alone, failed transactions cost UK consumers around £560m a year and the wider economy an estimated £950m.

Kord, founded in 2019, was built to close those gaps. Earlier this year, the ProVen VCTs invested in Kord’s £6.4m Series A, alongside Guinness Ventures, SFC Capital and angel investors. Here’s why.

1. One platform, not a patchwork

Most compliance software solves a single step: verifying someone’s identity, followed by corroborating documents and filings, before validating funds and checking for money laundering.

And yet, fraud in high-value transactions rarely happens because one of these checks was missed. It happens in the gaps between checks, where account details are shared by email or a document arrives from an unconfirmed source.

Here’s where Kord gets to work. It creates a unified sequence of processes with identity verification, AML and compliance checks, onboarding, document signing and payments all running through a single platform, with secure digital wallets and dedicated client money accounts.

A firm can now verify a client and then receive their money without either party leaving the verified environment. That closed loop matters, as it removes the seams through which fraudsters have traditionally operated.

The architecture is modular, so customers adopt what they need first and extend over time. Commercially, this is highly attractive as firms integrate once, and usage grows with them, in a category where switching is painful and rare.

Kord grew its revenues from around £0.5m to over £5m in a single year, and now serves over 100 paying customers, processing millions on their behalf. Speaking with large enterprise customers across both legal and property, the consistent theme was that Kord is not a tool at the edge of the workflow. It is the workflow.

2. A founder who lived the problem

James Owusu spent eight years onboarding clients at UK banks, across mortgages and private wealth and saw the process from both sides: the firm chasing documents, and the client navigating several different processes.

As a result, Kord spent its first years building the platform and securing the regulatory permissions that underpin it before scaling commercially. That sequencing is slow and unglamorous, and it is also why the business can now offer regulated payments and client money accounts alongside verification, something very few providers can credibly do.

What impressed us alongside the vision was the discipline. Kord reached meaningful scale having raised a modest amount of funding, and this round was deliberately sized to the business's actual needs rather than to the money available.

In our experience, founders who resist raising more than they need tend to build better companies. James now leads a team of 48, many of whom have been building the company since the early days – testament to the culture that James has built, and his vision for the business.

3. Regulation and fraud are pulling in the same direction

Two structural forces are converging on Kord's market. The first is fraud: the identity verification market is forecast to grow from roughly $15.8bn in 2026 to $26.8bn by 2031, driven largely by AI-generated documents and deepfakes. Single-source checks are no longer enough, and Kord's advantage is breadth, verifying a client against a wider range of data sources than a document scan alone.

The second is client money. The Solicitors Regulation Authority has consulted on strengthening how law firms handle it, and the FCA has extended CASS-style safeguarding requirements to payment institutions from this year. Regulated firms are being pushed towards verified, properly segregated client money infrastructure.

Taken together, these obligations are not only non-cyclical but tend to intensify in downturns, when defaults, disputes and fraud all rise. Estate agents, conveyancers, law firms and financial services businesses will all be asked to do more, more often, and Kord answers both demands through a single API integration.

As James puts it, “we’re creating a closed-loop environment where you get onboarded and make a payment on the same system. Nobody has to worry about money going to the wrong place or a bad actor getting involved”.

3. Why the ProVen VCTs, and why now

At the ProVen VCTs, we look for businesses where customers describe the product as essential rather than useful. Kord clears that bar, embedded in workflows that firms cannot afford to get wrong. The funding will scale the commercial engine, continue product development, and strengthen the senior team, including a CFO and CMO.

Regulated industries have spent a decade digitising individual steps of the transaction. Kord is digitising the whole thing. We are delighted to be backing James and the team on that journey.