BetterCo: interview with founder Eckhard Ortwein

Almost 70% of lawyers across firms of all sizes see the growing demands on their own IT skills as the biggest challenge in developing their firms.

Time-consuming administrative processes and expanded obligations – arising, for example, from new anti-money laundering laws (GwG) and the associated Know Your Customer (KYC) processes – make it harder to keep track of and manage the digital transformation. This calls the actual goals into question: ensuring legal compliance on the one hand, and working with clients successfully and on a basis of trust on the other.

‍

Berlin-based legal tech company BetterCo, founded by Eckhard Ortwein, positions itself as a KYC and trust platform for collaboration between GwG-regulated businesses in tax, legal and finance and their network of customers, clients, investors and buyers.

‍

In this interview, founder and CEO Eckhard Ortwein talks about the meaning, purpose and benefits – and the future – of BetterCo as a single-source-of-trust platform:

‍

Explained in a few seconds – what is BetterCo?

BetterCo is a cloud-based trust and collaboration platform that enables collaboration between GwG-regulated businesses and their customers.

This includes, for example, law firms or tax firms working with their clients, funds with investors, payment service providers with merchants, and brokers with buyers. In particular, the effort around the GwG and the associated KYC processes is reduced, saving time and money. On this basis, a reliable foundation of trust and collaboration can be built.

‍

What problem do you want to solve with BetterCo?

The volume and complexity of compliance guidelines, the requirements for implementing anti-money laundering legislation and the associated KYC processes keep growing. Regulated businesses in legal, tax and finance are particularly affected, as they are additionally burdened by high formal hurdles. Collaborating with customers, clients, investors and buyers has become increasingly difficult, and their dissatisfaction grows with every additional PDF form. Keeping track becomes far harder when "collaboration" takes place via email ping-pong.

Simply put, a feeling of overload and frustration in collaboration has crept in.

This is exactly where BetterCo comes in: we create a trusted, central platform for collaboration among all parties – a single source of trust – on which shared processes are mapped.

Intuitive usability, the use of public data sources, shared access and smart AI help optimize and automate time-consuming bureaucratic processes. All company data, events, documents, metrics and tasks are up to date and accessible to everyone on a centralized platform that is nonetheless open via interfaces. That way, everyone has what they need for their work.

This not only achieves high efficiency, cutting lead times from weeks to days and reducing effort by up to 90%. At the same time, regulated businesses dramatically increase the satisfaction of their customers, clients, investors and buyers – and with it, trust in their expertise. The result is long-term loyalty and shared success.

‍

We want to make tedious KYC processes easier

"In regulated industries, implementing customer onboarding and monitoring processes poses major challenges for employees," says Eckhard Ortwein, founder of BetterCo. "That's where we come in: we optimize and automate time-consuming administrative processes and map them on the BetterCo trust platform for all parties."

‍

‍

How did the idea for BetterCo come about?

Our founding team worked in regulated industries for many years and watched the requirements of the anti-money laundering laws (GwG) for the necessary Know Your Customer (KYC) processes for onboarding and ongoing monitoring of customers grow steadily. At the same time, the way these processes are handled has remained stuck in exchanging emails and PDF forms. This is extremely inefficient, highly unsatisfying and time-consuming for all parties, and closes compliance gaps only inadequately – even though the same data is exchanged again and again under the GwG.

This is exactly where BetterCo comes in. We see the GwG as a quasi-standard on the basis of which, using publicly available data sources, we drastically simplify collaboration between GwG-regulated businesses and their customers, clients, investors and buyers – to reduce costs, ensure legal compliance and lay the groundwork for successful long-term collaboration.

‍

What does the lawyer of the future look like to you?

At its core, the lawyer of the future will continue to provide highly competent legal advice in their areas of expertise. But they will be much more efficient and will significantly reduce the share of administrative tasks they currently handle themselves. Put the other way around, they can then focus on "billable" work.

The way legal advice is delivered has already changed considerably through advances in technology, especially software and the internet – from faxes to emails, from filing cabinets to cloud data management – and this trend will continue. I think lawyers will be challenged more in their "digital" way of working and will need to be correspondingly more adaptable.

‍

Do you have any advice for lawyers who want or need to engage with legal tech?

I think it's important to stay up to date and watch which legal tech innovations emerge and catch on. There are so many ways today to make your working life easier and more efficient. So I think it's advisable to experiment "hands-on" with new solutions rather than always waiting until adopting a new solution becomes unavoidable. It often helps to take the client's perspective and adapt to how they are evolving.

What I find exciting is that most lawyers in particular see legal tech as an opportunity for improvement. We have explored this topic in more detail in a Whitepaper, which can be downloaded from our website.

‍

‍

In a nutshell – where do you see the added value of BetterCo?

Improved and simplified handling of KYC processes and ongoing client monitoring result in cost savings of up to 90%. For a firm with around 100 new clients per year and 1,000 existing clients, that means a substantial amount of around EUR 24,000 per year. Using the "ROI Calculator" on our website, every firm can see the numbers for itself.

At the same time, greater competence in collaboration increases client satisfaction – a factor not to be underestimated. Suddenly, collaboration is more enjoyable, and that is a foundation for successful long-term cooperation

‍

‍

Where will BetterCo be in a year?

Our goal is to become the standard collaboration platform in Germany for regulated businesses and their customers, clients, investors and buyers. Since the GwG, as a planned EU regulation, will become directly applicable law, our internationalization is also on the horizon.

‍

Eckhard, thank you very much for your time and the conversation.

‍

Interested in getting to know BetterCo better?

Feel free to book a free product demo and find out how BetterCo delivers a clear, shared and unified vision for regulated businesses and everyone involved – while measurably reducing effort, time and costs.

‍