Alexis Rog founder and CEO of Sikoia talks about the tech firm and the exciting way its technology is automating customer processes saving time and money.
Tell us about your organisation and what makes it different from others in your sector.
Sikoia is transforming the way lenders and brokers automate customer verification processes. We serve a diverse clientele, from fintechs and brokers to established lenders, and we are regulated by the FCA as both an open banking and credit reference provider.
What sets us apart is our ability to deliver significant productivity savings and industry-leading turnaround times. For instance, in the mortgage context, we accurately and cost-effectively extract data from customer-supplied documents, effectively tackling challenges that have historically slowed the process.
Traditionally, verifying bank statements, payslips, and tax returns for a mortgage takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 1.5 hours per application. With Sikoia, that time can be reduced to just seconds! Our AI-powered tool automates the entire document processing workflow, verifying their integrity, ensuring application completeness and checking income, employer and affordability automatically. It provides real-time feedback to customers, eliminating unnecessary back-and-forth and manual review queues. The result? A significantly improved customer experience with faster turnaround times.
When, how and why was Sikoia founded?
Before founding Sikoia, I worked as a tech investor, where I saw first-hand the rise of fintech solutions that helped tackle specific challenges such as identity verification, open banking, and anti-money laundering. While these innovations brought clear benefits to the financial services sector, they also resulted in fragmentation, data silos, and a continuous need to cross-validate information between different sources. Even today, many of these processes are still handled manually or patched together through custom-built, in-house systems.
This is why I established Sikoia in 2021. I saw an opportunity to create a technology company that could unify customer data from various sources and address process inefficiencies that were still prevalent in financial services. Our goal is to build a platform that could streamline customer verification processes and provide a more seamless experience for both providers and their customers.
Why did Sikoia join the Council?
We joined the Equity Release Council to contribute to the evolving landscape of the equity release market and align with the Council’s mission to enhance customer protection and drive innovation. As the Council implements important updates to its standards—such as mandatory income and expenditure assessments—we saw a unique opportunity to offer our expertise in AI and automation to support advisers in meeting these new requirements.
By becoming a member, Sikoia aims to play an active role in shaping the future of the equity release sector, ensuring that our technology aligns with the Council’s goal of improving client outcomes and safeguarding the integrity of the process.
How might your services benefit other members and/or their clients?
Sikoia’s services offer unmatched time and cost savings for members by automating complex and time-consuming tasks. This enables advisers to focus more on delivering personalised, value-added advice to their clients.
With Sikoia, tasks such as affordability checks, income, and employer verification, and document processing can be automated, significantly reducing the administrative burden on advisers. This not only boosts operational efficiency but also ensures clients receive accurate, timely information, leading to better outcomes. Existing Sikoia clients report saving an hour of manual work per application and reducing related costs by 75%.
By adopting Sikoia’s platform, members can enhance compliance with the latest Council standards while also improving customer satisfaction.
What are the greatest opportunities and challenges facing your business at the moment?
Just a few years ago, implementing a technological solution to automatically process customer application documents was prohibitively expensive and often unreliable. Today, artificial intelligence has bridged that gap at a much more accessible cost. Our greatest opportunity lies in the growing role of AI in transforming the mortgage and equity release markets. As we replace manual processes with AI-powered automation, the potential for significant time savings and an enhanced customer experience is enormous. The best part of it is that it doesn’t require changes in customer or user habits like for example open banking does.
One of the challenges we face is raising awareness in the market about the existence of innovative solutions like ours. This involves educating potential users on how our tool works, what it can accomplish, and its limitations. Additionally, we need to address concerns that AI might replace the human touch in the industry, which is not the case. If anything, tools like Sikoia are here to enhance the process and help provide more value added advice.
Where do you see your business in five years?
Our goal is to become a ubiquitous presence in the financial services sector, enabling unparalleled time and productivity savings for tasks that are predominantly handled manually today.
We are on a mission to unlock the power of data, making financial services more seamless, customer-centric, and inclusive. In five years, we aim to be the go-to provider for financial firms seeking to automate customer onboarding and verification processes, both in the UK and selected international markets.
Is there anything else you want to tell us?
As AI remains a debated topic, it might be worth cementing that our philosophy at Sikoia is that AI and automation are meant to support humans, not replace them. By automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks—such as document processing and customer verification—we free up valuable time for professionals to focus on what truly matters: nurturing relationships and acquiring new customers. Automation should empower advisers, brokers, and lenders to provide more personalised service, allowing them to dedicate more time to client engagement and less to administrative work. Ultimately, we believe AI enhances the human side of financial services, enabling professionals to focus on high-impact interactions and strategic decisions.
- The views of contributors are not necessarily shared by the Council
