FIGHTING FINANCIAL CRIME

It takes an ambitious and energetic team to tackle the challenges that come with preventing financial crime. Enter Unit21, where making the impossible happen is just another day at the office. Recently, the team had to scale their systems to onboard a data-heavy client. “Everyone worked hard to achieve what seemed like an insurmountable task, and we pulled it off,” Clarence Chio said. When the team isn’t hustling on big goals, they make time for their “moonshot” ideas in biannual hackathons and share their work in weekly companywide meetings where a one-of-a-kind non-fungible token — minted specifically for this event — is up for grabs. “People go crazy and pull out all the stops to win,” said Chio.

View Gallery

Featured employees

---

With high goals come high standards

As the CEO and co-founder of Unit21, Trisha Kothari has a clear understanding of what it takes to lead a team helping customers use vital data to fight fraud and money laundering. Her focus falls into three buckets: setting high goals, hiring the people to meet them, and building the culture that brings it all together. While Unit21’s values help direct and set the bar for hiring, they also impact internal processes. “We promote people who exhibit merit and our values, and we strongly believe in internal promotion,” said Kothari.

Trisha Kothari

CEO and Co-Founder

We are building extremely important technology to make the world a safer place.

---

Where experimentation can open new doors

Clarence Chio

CTO and Co-Founder

Though he wears a lot of hats as CTO and co-founder at Unit21, Clarence Chio primarily manages product development and solves the associated problems. In addition to Python and Typescript — and because urgency is key in shipping products — the team leverages the efficiency of managed services and cloud SaaS platforms. “Our philosophy is to only build things we can’t buy,” said Chio. That’s one reason he supports the team in exploring new tech. “We spend a huge amount of our bandwidth on experimentation — including things we’re not sure will work, but could make a difference if they do.”

We encourage engineers and product managers to leverage their niche understanding of certain technology to build products in a way that is different from the status quo.

---