100+ Years of AI & Banking Expertise One Mission: Trustworthy Entity Data
Every critical decision — approving a payment, clearing a counterparty, onboarding a customer — depends on knowing who or what you're dealing with. ioNova makes entity data trustworthy.
Our Heritage
ACE → Pelican → ioNova
One of the longest continuous production AI track records in the payments industry — from pioneering NLP for SWIFT messages to solving the ISO 20022 address crisis.
In 1993, Parth Desai founded ACE Software Solutions — one of the first companies globally to apply Natural Language Processing to SWIFT payment message processing. ACE grew to serve 100+ financial institutions across 55+ countries, building the domain expertise that only comes from decades in production.
In 2016, ACE became Pelican AI, scaling to $5T+ annual transaction processing and winning the Frost & Sullivan 2017 Global Payments Innovation Award. Pelican was included in Gartner's Banker's Guide to Transaction Banking and maintained a 20+ year trusted partnership with SWIFT.
In 2024, the same team founded ioNova AI to solve two pressing challenges: the ISO 20022 address data quality crisis ahead of the November 2026 SWIFT CBPR+ deadline, and the need for evidence-first entity intelligence in regulated environments.
ioNova AI is not a startup. It is the latest chapter in a 30-year story of building AI that banks trust with their most consequential data challenges.
30+
Years in Production AI
$5T+
Processed Annually
55+
Countries Served
1B+
Transactions / Year
Our Philosophy
Knowledge First, Not Model First
70% of enterprise AI projects fail — not because the technology is inadequate, but because organisations start with the model and force-fit it to their business.
Entity data — the people, companies, products, and transactions that flow through every enterprise — is scattered across dozens of systems, duplicated in conflicting formats, and silently degrading every downstream process. "Acme Corp" in your CRM is "ACME Corporation" in your ERP and "Acme Inc." in compliance. Multiply this across millions of entities, and the result is a trust deficit costing billions annually.
ioNova is built on Knowledge First AI™ — we start with the enterprise's own knowledge, structure it into an Enterprise Knowledge Model, and only then deploy AI on top. This is why we achieve what generic AI cannot.
Deterministic Accuracy
Zero hallucinations in production. Every AI output is grounded in verified enterprise knowledge, not generated from parametric memory.
Audit-Grade Evidence
Every decision is explainable, every claim citable. Governance isn't bolted on — it's the architectural foundation.
100% User Adoption
A proven methodology refined across 50+ enterprise implementations with zero project failures — built for how regulated enterprises actually operate.
No Rip & Replace
Overlays intelligence on existing infrastructure without data migration. Resolves entities in real-time across 50+ systems in under 200ms.
The Platform
Two Products, One Architecture
Purpose-built for the two most pressing data challenges in regulated financial services.
Address Intelligence Platform
Converts unstructured address data into fully compliant structured output for ISO 20022. Targeting >99% STP rates ahead of the November 2026 SWIFT CBPR+ deadline. Deploys as a lightweight 10–16 week sidecar with zero disruption to existing infrastructure.
Evidence-first entity resolution and governed AI copilots. Enables golden record creation, targeting 60–70% false positive reduction in AML monitoring, and meeting KYC requirements with full auditability and field-level provenance.
Both platforms share the same Knowledge First AI™ architecture: deterministic processing, complete audit trails, and sidecar deployment that overlays intelligence on existing infrastructure without data migration or system replacement.
Named, on-the-record testimonials from executives at the world's leading financial institutions.
“
Pelican has delivered a comprehensive, intelligent and cost-effective payment enrichment solution to BMO. Their AI-powered straight-through processing capabilities have transformed our payment operations.
The selection of Pelican's AI technology for our sanctions screening demonstrates our commitment to leveraging advanced intelligence for compliance excellence.
100+ years of combined experience across AI, banking technology, payments, compliance, and enterprise security. Forged over three decades of building AI systems at the heart of global financial infrastructure.
Parth Desai
Founder & Chairman
MS AI, GA Tech | Yale AI Lab INSEAD | IIT B CSE '85
Built Pelican AI, ACE Software Solutions, and PelicanPay each advancing AI's role in financial services. Developed the Knowledge First AI™ methodology after witnessing billions wasted on AI projects that started with models instead of knowledge. Founded his first AI-for-banking company in 1994, building platforms now processing $5T+ annually across 55+ countries for Tier 1 global banks.
Dr. Ruth Wandhöfer
Board Advisor
Bayes Business School · Ex-Citi, EPC
One of the foremost global authorities on SEPA and ISO 20022; helped write the original SEPA Credit Transfer rulebook and negotiated the Payment Services Directive that became the legal foundation of European payments. Spent 11+ years at Citi as Global Head of Regulatory & Market Strategy, chairing the European banking industry's key payments policy bodies and sitting on EPC board.
Ishan Tarunesh
Co-Founder & CTO
B.Tech CS, IIT Bombay · ACL & EACL Published · AIR 33 JEE
Leads technology strategy, platform architecture, and ioNova's proprietary NER and cascade entity resolution engines. Published NLP research on multilingual modelling and cross-lingual text processing maps directly to ioNova's core: parsing, normalising, and resolving entity data across languages, scripts, and formats.
Runs ioNova's commercial engine — enterprise partnerships, product operations, and go-to-market. At Amazon, built AI/ML data tools delivering measurable savings at scale. Co-built and scaled an AI services company to $5M+ valuation serving 50+ global customers, entirely bootstrapped.
Why This Team
The Rare Intersection
Entity intelligence demands expertise that few organisations possess simultaneously.
Domain Depth
30+ years pioneering AI in banking. Deep knowledge of how payments flow, compliance decisions are made, and entity data propagates across systems.
AI & NLP Research
Published at ACL and EACL. Advanced capabilities to extract, normalise, match, and resolve entities across languages, formats, and data quality levels.
Enterprise Discipline
Every AI decision grounded in verified knowledge — not statistical probability — with full auditability at production scale. Zero project failures across 50+ implementations.
Purpose-Built for Regulated Industries
The only entity intelligence platform trusted by the world's leading financial institutions for their most consequential data challenges.
