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Case Study

NetGuardians: Beating fraud from the inside

By Carlos Cordon and Teresa Ferreiro Vilarino

13 pages

September 2016

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Reference: IMD-7-1819

After developing powerful software, young entrepreneurs Raffael Maio and Joël Winteregg, founded NetGuardians in 2007. Their initial idea was to help companies improve security. (i) Over time, the two entrepreneurs improved their technology and decided to focus on defeating and preventing fraud in banking, where there was a gap in the market. In 2014 around $67 billion was lost due to banking fraud, 70% of it committed by employees inside the company. In 2015 the company was named a Gartner Cool Vendor, a worldwide industry recognition for companies that offer technologies or solutions that are innovative, impactful and intriguing. (ii) In the nine years since they had founded their company, Joël and Raffael had raised $6 billion in two rounds of funding. The company employed around 30 people in R&D offices in Kenya, Singapore and Poland. It had customers in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, and was breaking ground in Asia. (iii) Now it was time for NetGuardians to tackle some important strategic decisions: Should the company expand to other markets? Should it expand its product offering? Or should it focus on growing its customer base? (iv) Whatever the decision, it would lead to a change in business model that would have a significant impact on the company.

Learning Objective

To show how companies can extract their learning from small data and subsequently implement that knowledge using big data.
To introduce participants to different ways of handling data using a variety of software tools (structured vs. non structured data).
To describe the evolution of a start-up, from its beginnings until it faces important strategic decisions in order to develop further.

Keywords

Finance, Fraud, Big Data, Start-up, Business Model, Strategy

Settings

Europe, Switzerland
NetGuardians, Finance and Insurance, Manufacturing, Technology
2007-2016

Type

Field Research

Available Languages

English, Chinese

Related material

Teaching note, Video

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