Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome Inside the ICE House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ICE's exchanges around the world. Now let's go Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Lance Glinn.
Lance Glinn:
E-commerce fraud is skyrocketing threatening businesses and consumers alike in today's digital shopping era. From stolen credit card details to account takeovers, fraudsters are becoming more sophisticated, leaving companies with massive financial losses and consumers with compromised personal data. Every fraudulent transaction chips away at trust, making online shopping feel riskier than ever.
That's where Riskified, that's NYC ticker symbol, RSKD, comes into help. Founded in 2013 by Eido Gal and Assaf Feldman. Riskified is on a mission to make e-commerce safer and more seamless for both merchants and consumers. For over a decade, as online shopping has evolved, Riskified has stayed ahead of the curve with cutting edge technology designed to detect and prevent fraud in real time.
Joining us today is Aglika Dotcheva, Riskified's CFO, who has been with the company since 2014. Beyond leading Riskified's financial strategy, Agi is a key figure in the CFO community. She's a founding member and steering committee leader of F Suite, an exclusive platform connecting CFOs in venture capital and tech.
So Agi, to get started, for those unfamiliar with Riskified, just take us through what the company is, what it does, how you would describe the company's mission in terms of its impact and its commitment to customers?
Aglika Dotcheva:
Thank you, Lance, thank you for inviting me, it's great to be here.
So when our founders, Assaf Feldman and Eido Gal founded Riskified, they had a very clear mission in mind, and that is to solve the challenge of e-commerce fraud. So let me give you just an example of the problem that merchants are facing today and how we're helping them solve that. So if I just now go and steal your credit cards and go buy something online, you are going to open your bank statement, you're going to see that somebody has used your credit card, you're going to call your bank and they're going to take the money away from the merchant. So the result of that is that the merchant is liable for the fraud or for the chargebacks that are occurring. And at the same time, they'll be afraid of approving some good transactions.
So when we started the company, our mission was to explore what is the maximum transactions that we can approve without exposing the merchants to unneeded fraud. And this is what we started solving for very much in the beginning. Obviously things evolved after that. And what's started as an advanced fraud prevention tool has now grown in a much more powerful platform. And we address a range of risks from emerging fraud threats to omnichannel abuse. So ensuring that we're optimizing for growth and higher approval rates along the entire customer journey.
Lance Glinn:
So I'd like to talk about your journey prior to us getting more into Riskified and everything going on with the company. You have a BA from Columbia, an MBA from NYU Stern, early career experiences in finance. But even before then, before college, obviously a interest in a particular field sprouts from somewhere. So where did your passion for numbers originate? And what drew you to wanting to be involved in the economics behind a company's success?
Aglika Dotcheva:
So I'll step back and give you a little bit of a story before I went to the US. So I'm originally Bulgarian, I was born in Bulgaria, I grew up there. I grew up during the chaotic years after communism fell in Eastern Europe. And that had a profound impact on me. It was a time of fast shifts in the economy, social structure, culture. And all these changes combined with a lot of adversity and challenges, financial insecurities really impacted me in a big way. So some of the things that I start value early on is actually stability growing up in such chaotic times, I think it was something that I started to appreciate, the importance of strong foundation and to build this strong foundation regardless of what is surrounding you.
So in the nineties I started studying law, I became a law student in Sofia University. And 1997 actually was a very memorable year for me. A lot of things happen and shaped up some of the person that I've become today. So 1997 was a time of a lot of economic challenges in Bulgaria, as I mentioned, the government at the time was trying to manage the economic situation, but things were spiraling fast. And in the beginning of the year, the country was getting into hyperinflation. Inflation was more than 2000%. The local lev was getting devalued and there was just a lot of turmoil. Daily protests started on the streets.
At that time, I was a student of law in the university. And me and my colleagues just we were very active of analyzing everything that was happening. And together I helped them organize to stand up against the government. So we organized a university strike. And consequently we spent a lot of time on the streets protesting against the government.
So that period, again, a lot of instability, a lot of changes really influenced me in a way that the way I'm perceiving everything and what I'm looking for, going back to this sense of looking for stability and creating something that it's more permanent in a period of changes.
So eventually the government conceded and that's where that ended. But I felt a lot of disillusionment in this period. I applied for a green card through the US lottery. And surprisingly I won. So in 1998 is when I moved to New York by myself with a little bit of money from my summer jobs. And soon after I applied and I went to Columbia University. So finally I was able to pursue some of my passions to study economics.
Lance Glinn:
And what was the level of difficulty like when you come to the United States, like you said, with not much money in your pocket, obviously coming over via a green card, that must've been a tough journey in itself to come to a place that's unknown, with probably not many, if any, people that you knew, I can't imagine the hard times, the good times, the struggles, the triumphs that you went through in those initial months and years trying to find your place here in New York City.
Aglika Dotcheva:
It's definitely not an easy feat. It does require a lot of resourcefulness. I did start, I did find a job and very, very fast, I mean, this was part of the requirements when you're alone and just trying to figure how to do day by day. So actually one of my first jobs then was in a tech company. It was again the end of the nineties, beginning of 2000, so the end of the tech boom. And I started in a tech company and I just loved it. It was this kind of environment, working, creating something that it's new and entrepreneurial. And coming back to the US, what made it possible was understanding that there's a lot of opportunities. And if you're looking for these opportunities in your ambitions, it's much easier than what I saw back home. So that makes it much easier for me to deal with the difficulties because there was just a lot of opportunities if you're trying to find the things to help you.
Lance Glinn:
So then let's fast-forward a little bit to 2014. You start at Riskified. How were you first introduced to Eido and Assaf and the Riskified team and found your place where you've been for over the last decade?
Aglika Dotcheva:
Yeah, so actually, another period just after I graduated college led me to that, at least led me indirectly to that. So I graduated Columbia University in 2003. And 2003 was still a volatile year, a lot of lingering economic effects following the recession from 2001, a lot of unemployment and, again, uncertainty. But I was interviewing at the time and I got a job from one of the investment banks to start as an investment banking analyst. A few months later, they rescinded the offer, the unemployment spiked, it was difficult period. So I found myself graduating without a job offer, which is hard for any college student.
I ended up taking a temporary role, like a project. I start working in a tech startup, where the CEO asked me to create a model where I'll project the financial plan for his business and I'll help him fundraise. So that was a very interesting project. I worked with the CTO in the company to think about what is important for this model from product perspective, what works, what are the assumptions. And ultimately build this financial model.
So the CTO of the company was Assaf Feldman, who I met years later on just before I joined Riskified, he asked me if I would be willing to meet with the CEO because they need somebody like me who can help them and structure and create a financial model and just help them run some of the initial finance functions. And yeah, the rest is history.
Lance Glinn:
And so when you meet Eido, I presume, and then obviously knew Assaf from the past, and they are telling you about Riskified, telling about this idea that sprouted in 2013, was it just in your mind like, this is a match for me, this is where I belong?
Aglika Dotcheva:
I was interested in the product. I had a few discussions even before I met with Eido, with Assaf, and I was very intrigued by some of the economics of the product. In a way there's a lot of financial aspects of that product that I found interesting. And I had some sessions just discussions with him of how we can make things better and trying to understand what's important for the merchant, what is important for the company, what are the drivers of strengthening this relationship. So it was more of exploration. It wasn't something that I immediately felt that it's super important. But having these explorations before I even met with Eido, just by knowing Assaf and discussing some of the aspects of what he was doing, made it just possible to transfer on later on.
Lance Glinn:
So Riskified went public on the NYC in July of 2021 under the ticker symbol, RSKD. A milestone that, as I said with the company starting in 2013, was about nearly eight years in the making since Eido and Assaf founded Riskified. So we just talked about you joined in 2014, you've really had a front row seat to that journey from founding to IPO. Just what stands out to you most about the experience leading up to that day in July of 2021, the highs, the challenges, and really the anticipation as that big IPO day was approaching?
Aglika Dotcheva:
So the journey started much earlier I would say, you're starting to build a company, along the way prepare it for scale, grow it. The IPO itself is really just a milestone, and it's very important milestone, but the real work starts way before that. So when I joined Riskified was just after series A. And in the following 10 years since I've been with the company, we did that finance and we did four rounds of fundraising. We scaled the company and it grew by a lot.
During this period, I think I had to change my perspective of what was important in every stage. When I started in the beginning, I came from a much bigger company, so some of my requirements of what's the status of how we do certain things were much higher.
But quickly I realized that if you want to run fast, which is super important for a startup company, you have to adjust and adapt to what is needed at every single stage. So this was one of the things that was really important for me to do.
And in the beginning, I was doing a lot of things by myself, especially building the model, understanding the drivers, talking to a lot of people internal within the company from both go to market, from product again to understand how the business works, what is important.
Later on I realized that if I have to catch up, if I have to scale, I actually have to really upgrade my team. I'm not able to grow in my own role if I'm not able to really delegate and bring the right people at the right stage of the company. So that was also very important as part of the process preparing to go public. And understanding that everything has to happen at the right time. So when you are ready to go out that you have all the building blocks and at least the areas where you really have to build over time are covered. And then you can focus on what is important at this critical period just before you go public.
Lance Glinn:
How hard for you, over the course of that eight/seven years, I guess, from 2014 to 2021, how difficult was it that self-adaptation? Because you said that you had to change your mindset a couple of times throughout that process as you went from Series A, B, C, et cetera, ultimately to IPO. Is that a tough challenge because we're all human, we all like certain things the way they are, it's hard to adjust, it's hard to change your habits, your lifestyle, your mindset. So how difficult was that for you to go through these different mindset shifts to ultimately get to where you needed to go mentally to prepare for this IPO?
Aglika Dotcheva:
I think probably the most difficult part was actually in the beginning when I just started at Riskified and I had to deal with everything called finance. So I was alone. And I was coming from a much bigger organization before that. Now I had to really, really roll my sleeves and just start thinking about the basics, how to build the model, what is important for the model, what are the KPIs.
I remember when I first built one of our most important KPIs today, but back in the days when I first built it it took me a lot of time to figure out all the different data, the mechanics, and this is our chargeback to billing ratio by the way. So I remember when I first came with this KPI and I presented it internally and Eido, our CEO, said, "Yeah, that's interesting." And then he immediately focused back on the top line and just growing the business and everything else. So for a while that wasn't that important at the time. And now it's one of the most important metrics that we have.
So I think that in a way it's important to know where the business should be going. So coming from a big company, it helped me understand what is the path and where we need to get. The adaptation was more around like how much should we focus on different things at a different stage of the company. So maybe it was a shock in the beginning, but after that we were growing so fast so it was much easier. I felt like we are just running from one fundraise to another. Every other year was almost like another fundraising period, and so many different things happen in the company.
Lance Glinn:
So a company, any company that has dreams of going public and then eventually does, it can't have the success it does by being complacent, by staying the same, the company constantly has to evolve, it has to anticipate new trends, it has to observe growing trends and change as the years go by and as time changes. So from whether it be new areas of focus to emerging opportunities, whatever the case, how has Riskified in your mind evolved since starting in 2014 to now sitting here 11 years later? I know that's a long period of time, a decade is a long period of time, could have gone through multiple evolutions of sorts. But in just a few words, how has it evolved from when you started to where we are now in 2025?
Aglika Dotcheva:
A lot of changes in a lot of different area. I mean, let's just think about our product to start with. When we beginning, when we started, I think there were so many aspects that were even manual. Before I even started the company, I mean, the first transaction that were approved were approved by a few analysts just looking at the data and trying to do what potentially they created for a model to do.
So thinking about a few years later, serving some of the merchants that we started which were much smaller. And then once we became more accurate and our product became better, starting to get traction with some of the enterprises of the world out there. So there's some of these changes around developing the product was driving everything else in the company.
The requirements came in from the external world, but you had to really create the team and shift the technology and shift your priorities internally in order to adapt to the market and being able to deliver the solutions that our clients were looking at at the time.
So I would say the product was definitely one of the biggest things that's changed over time. And thinking of some of the new products that we also developed in the last couple of years, we started with our chargeback guarantee, and this is still our core product today. But especially after Covid, we understood that our merchants are facing a lot of other difficulties. For example, one of our new products is called Policy Protect, and deals with a problem that a lot of merchants are seeing in terms of their terms of service being abused and some of their policies being abused. And this is something that we had to evolve over time to make sure that we have solutions for all these areas that are important for our clients. With the one goal in mind, how to help them approve more, increase their revenue, and ultimately optimize and minimize their costs.
Lance Glinn:
And through all these changing products, what's the process or philosophy behind innovation, how do yourself, obviously Eido and Assaf and the rest of the leadership team observe a problem and then decide we need this product or we need to design this type of product to fix it? What's the process of that?
Aglika Dotcheva:
It really starts with our merchants and their needs. It starts from, we see ourselves as a partner to their needs. We always understand what is priority for them. We have a lot of QBRs. These are areas which are discussed and you ultimately think about new solutions or new products based on where their needs are.
So just to think, again, going back to Policy Protect, if you remember during Covid, just e-commerce became such a strong channel compared to everything in store disappearing at this time. So merchants were just trying to facilitate a lot of ease around the way people were shopping, the way people were returning. Of course some of them were great shoppers, but there's always a place for some policy abuse at the time.
So if you think of some of the cases that came out during that time, buying something online and then returning a completely different product in the store or just calling your merchants and just, it was so easy to say I didn't receive that. We understood at the time from our merchants that this is a big financial problem from that. And I believe that even over time this became even bigger problem than fraud itself.
And that's just the example of potentially how we think about evolution of our product and what we need to develop. Always talking to the merchants and always understanding what's top of mind for them.
Lance Glinn:
So speaking of product, speaking of innovation, company journey, as we've been discussing, Riskified recently entered into a partnership with Appriss Retail, a top provider of return and claim authorization solution. So before we dive further into that, can you just give me the strategic thinking behind this partnership? And why partnering with Appriss was the right move for Riskified?
Aglika Dotcheva:
So if we think about what we do online with our policy products, it's exactly what Appriss is doing, but they're doing it offline in the stores. And the idea about combining all the insights that we're seeing online together with what's Appriss seeing offline was super important in order to create this more accurate solution, whereby combining everything and a lot of data points both from the online and offline world, ultimately can produce a more accurate product. So this partnerships has evolved from the need of really understanding how to combine the offline and the online world and create a more accurate solution.
Lance Glinn:
So, is it that offline/online collaboration that really differentiates Riskified now from its competitors? How did this partnership with Appriss help create that separation from the rest of the competition?
Aglika Dotcheva:
Exactly, you're understanding it exactly right. You'll be much more precise and accurate if you have understanding of how the customer moves from all the different channels. And you see his interaction not only on the online world but also the offline. And by being these partners where we exchange this data and we see the customer journey not only on the online, but connected with also what's happening with the same customer on the offline world, together we can be much more precise.
Lance Glinn:
So Agi, beyond your role at Riskified as CFO, you serve on the executive board of The F Suite, an exclusive community for CFOs of high growth companies and funds. So how does The F Suite team, along with its events, the experience that it provides, support mentorship and help those in your similar field and in your similar position further develop their careers as finance leaders?
Aglika Dotcheva:
My involvement with F Suite started before they started F Suite. When I hired our currently GC, he was part of this community called L Suite, which is the legal counterpart or the sister network for F Suite. And I realized that he was just saving a lot of time and resources to network and understand different areas that we might be having questions while we were exploring different areas.
So I was like, "Why don't I have a network like this for CFOs?" It just didn't make sense. So that's how at the time he said, "Well, I can connect you with Kiran." And Kiran is the founder of F Suite and L Suite. And we start talking and I expressed my interest of if he ever thinks of creating a network that I'm part of it.
And lucky for all of us CFOs today member of F Suite, he did just that. He established the F Suite community and I became a founding member and currently sit on the advisory board for late stage companies and public companies, CFOs.
And what F Suite really provides for us, I mean, what really this is is a community for CFOs of high growth companies, tech companies which allows us to exchange information to me to discuss areas that are super important for our day-to-day. And we have a lot of different events, we have a lot of different opportunities to connect. And it has been an essential part of me growing up as my career as a CFO.
Lance Glinn:
So, Agi, as we now wrap up with you, CEO, Eido Gal, CTO, Assaf Feldman, and the leadership team focused on the future, how are you all planning Riskified's trajectory to obviously ensure continued success and growth in the years to come?
Aglika Dotcheva:
I'm really proud of what we've achieved over the years. We are a growing company in a big market and we have amazing clients that we are working in providing value every single day. And I'm hopeful that we continue to evolve and the market continues to grow, we'll be able to continue to aspire and fulfill our mission, provide more value for the customers, make e-commerce safer and just take risk off the table as we help our clients.
Lance Glinn:
Well, Agi, I appreciate the work you're doing, the work that Riskified is doing. And thank you so much for joining us inside the ICE House.
Aglika Dotcheva:
Thank you, Lance. It was great to be here.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen. And follow us on X at ICE House Podcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week Inside the ICE House.
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
