Focus on the flywheel of innovation: David Buxton, CEO Arachnys Inspiring Leadership interview with Jonathan Bowman-Perks MBE

David Buxton, CEO of Arachnys – Focus on the flywheel of innovation David started Arachnys because he thought it was obvious that banks should be using better data to make decisions about compliance and risk. He used his investigative background to find the best data sources and combined it with cutting-edge technology to invent new ways of harvesting and mining data. Eight years of working with banks have given him a lot of hard learnings, including why you shouldn’t assume that the problem you think is easy is in fact already solved, the business model challenges that working with large organisations cause, and the leadership learnings that have come from having to scale an organisation from a shared office in Cambridge to an international company supporting customers in every timezone.Before being the founder and CEO of his own business he was an associate consultant at Control Risks from 2007-2010.

David is a former Control Risks investigator who worked on due diligence, anti-corruption and fraud investigations in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other former Soviet countries. As well as Russian, David speaks Spanish, Croatian, French and bad Turkish. He studied Philosophy and Russian at Oxford University.

David says: “Our vision at Arachnys is to create a world where everyone can have confidence in the people they do business with.

We help major banks and corporations make fast, high-quality and defensible customer risk decisions by building a true risk profile of customers and counter-parties.

Arachnys’ platform includes market-leading solutions for onboarding, investigations and periodic review.”

He found his technology company to help organisations on board new customers with far less friction than they currently have. The piece of advice he wished he had when he had started out as a young man was: ask more questions and don’t answer them yourself. Ask for help more. Beware of overweening self pride and fear of failure.  Reduce friction, minimise risk and have proof points.