How a Main Line company helps banks crack down on human traffickers

Inside a suburban office park off Route 202 in Wayne, Pa., a fintech company is using tech to help Asian authorities put the kibosh on human trafficking rings.

QuantaVerse, founded in 2014, combines data science with artificial intelligence in order to track and identify transactions by shady users: like money launderers, terrorist financiers or, as shown in a documentary released last week by The Economist, human traffickers.

“This is an email that we received from Liberty Asia,” says CIO Phil McLaughlin in the documentary. “They sent us info about bad guys that they have found.”

Founder and CEO Dave McLaughlin, a financial services industry expert and a Navy vet, explains the next step:

“And so now, the names of those individuals are in our database,” the founder said. “And anytime there’s a transaction in the future, regardless of where it comes from, we’re scanning against the database we’ve been collecting of people. If they ever do some transaction from financial services organizations we’re going to know it, if it’s a client of ours, and we’re going to see it and understand that those people are engaged in human trafficking.”

The company has raised about $2.7 million in seed in capital thus far.

Here’s the documentary, cued up to the segment with QuantaVerse. Catch the company again at 26:10.