Passfort

PassFort was a London-based RegTech company that built a cloud-native SaaS platform for customer onboarding, identity verification, and ongoing risk and compliance management. The platform automated customer due diligence, enhanced due diligence, KYC, KYB and AML workflows, delivering data from more than 25 third-party providers and automating the collection, verification and secure storage of customer and supplier due diligence documentation. Compliance teams used it to centralize customer profiles, apply risk-based decisioning, maintain detailed audit trails, and manage risk across the customer lifecycle rather than at a single point of onboarding.

A central component was a "smart policy builder": a low- or no-code, flowchart-style workflow tool that let compliance staff configure jurisdiction- and product-specific KYC steps and decision points, producing dynamic risk profiles. An orchestration engine aimed to maximize straight-through processing while routing higher-risk or ambiguous cases to human analysts for judgment. The platform supported onboarding across 197 countries and 211 jurisdictions and interoperated with existing back-office systems via pre-built connectors, APIs and webhooks.

Following the December 2021 acquisition, PassFort was folded into the KYC business within Moody's Analytics, where it augmented the Orbis company database and the GRID database of risk profiles, adverse news, politically exposed persons and sanctions. The passfort.com domain now redirects to Moody's compliance product pages, which describe an integrated platform spanning entity verification, registry-based verification, beneficial ownership tracing, sanctions and adverse-media screening, continuous monitoring, configurable onboarding workflows and AI-assisted automation.

Founding story

PassFort was founded in 2015 by Donald Gillies and Henry Irish, who met through the Entrepreneur First 2015 cohort. Gillies has described the founding insight as the observation that compliance professionals could not configure, manage and evolve customer onboarding and risk-monitoring processes as easily as sales and marketing staff could configure their own tooling — that there was, in his framing, no "Salesforce for compliance" and that RegTech had not benefited from the enterprise software revolution. A secondary profile similarly attributes the origin to the cost and error-proneness of manual compliance work. Entrepreneur First backed the company early, alongside OpenOcean and Episode 1.

Business model

SaaS. PassFort described itself as "born in the cloud" and primarily sold a hardware-free, configurable software subscription with a choice of deployment options, positioned as affordable to implement and evolve relative to legacy systems.

Software-as-a-service subscription sold to regulated businesses, with multiple deployment options offered alongside the core cloud product.

Traction

Revenues grew approximately 2.5x in the year preceding the 2021 Series A, according to a secondary profile. The round followed customer wins including Curve and WorldRemit. By 2021 the platform supported onboarding across 197 countries and 211 jurisdictions and integrated more than 25 data providers.

Latest developments

Moody's completed the acquisition of PassFort in December 2021 and integrated it into the KYC unit of Moody's Analytics. A secondary profile states that by 2025 PassFort's technology had been folded into Moody's Maxsight. The former PassFort URLs now serve Moody's compliance marketing pages describing entity data, registry-based verification in 200+ jurisdictions, ownership and UBO analysis, sanctions and adverse-media screening, event-driven monitoring, and built-in AI agents for screening and due diligence report generation. Co-founder Donald Gillies is described as now investing in and mentoring European and US founders.