IT security company Group-IB, a Skolkovo resident, has been awarded a mini-grant of 5 million rubles from the foundation to develop its payment protection system.
The money, which is added to private investment of the same amount, will be put towards completing the commercial version of its product, known as Bot-Trek Intelligent Bank.
“Perfecting the product will help us improve the efficiency of identifying fraud on websites and online payment systems,” says Pavel Krylov, the head of product development at Group-IB.
The grant will also assist with marketing activities and research projects in identifying various criminal activities plus intellectual property protection.
“Bot-Trek Intelligent Bank has been engineered incorporating more than 10 years of our team’s experience in fighting fraud on the internet,” Krylov said. “The product uses innovative methods of identifying both known and new attacks. Besides, a crucial factor of Bot-Trek’s work is a using actual instances of fraud and the instruments and methods employed, which are gathered by our other products in the daily routine of Group-IB in monitoring and fighting fraud.”
The R&D subsidiary of Group-IB is also a resident of the Skolkovo Foundation and a separate legal entity. The main business of Group-IB is connected with investigation of crimes in a sphere of IT, whereas the R&D-subdivision conducts research surveys and also services clients. The development of Bot-Trek Intelligent Bank began as an R&D-project and resulted in an independent commercial product.
Financial institutions are constantly suffering losses caused by online banking theft against their customers. This occurs because of the inability to control the security level of the customer and his device – the weakest links in Internet payment security.
Bot-Trek Intelligent Bank solves this problem and compliments existing security features. It detects preparation for, and the committing of fraudulent transactions in real time.
Sergey Khodakov, Skolkovo’s chief of IT security projects, praised Group-IB as a crucial player in the Russian market.
“According to the specialists, only in Russia and CIS countries in 2014, companies lost more than $330 million through fraud,” he said.
“We hope that completing the product (Bot-trek) with the awarded grant, the company will present a highly efficient solution to the market. We also hope that the company will be able to establish itself as a leader in the Russian market and successfully begin commercialization on world markets.”
Group-IB says the reworked version of Bot-Trek Intelligent Bank is to go live in the first quarter of 2016.
The project took second place in Innovative Projects competition Isecurity.
Having Skolkovo resident status provides tax breaks, discounted office space, access to mentors and investors, and a wealth of other benefits. More than 1,000 Russian and foreign startups have residency status. Startups can qualify for grants on the proviso that they raise the same or more from private channels.
Skolkovo PR and Communications Department assistant Kyuder Tsedenov contributed to this article.