CoinGeek Backstage: Disrupting the auditing industry with Abendum’s Torje Sunde

On Day 1 of CoinGeek Zurich, Kurt Wuckert Jr. moderated a panel of experts who talked about triple entry accounting on blockchain. One of them was Torje Vingen Sunde, the CTO of Abendum. He later joined CoinGeek Backstage where he broke down triple entry accounting, what the future holds for Abendum and the company’s recent inclusion in a regulatory sandbox by the Norwegian government.

“There has been a lot of really interesting academic papers on triple entry accounting, and now with Abendum we’re trying to make it a commercially viable implementation,” he told CoinGeek’s Patrick Thompson on the sidelines of the Zurich event.

Sunde has a background in the audit industry, having worked for one of the Big Four audit companies, and in that time, he noticed there’s “a lot of footwork in gathering audit evidence.” Abendum is seeking to solve this challenge, using external confirmations that makes the audit process much smoother.

Auditing is a tedious job, more so for big companies that have thousands of clients. The biggest pain point is in verifying all the financial data that the auditor has to sort through. Fortunately, blockchain technology solves this challenge, allowing all parties to easily verify all data they handle. This is where Abendum’s solutions come in, relying on the massively scalable BSV enterprise blockchain to power its platform, as founder Stephan Nilsson told CoinGeek.

Abendum’s great potential has been evident to many, despite the company being in its first year. One of these is the Norwegian Financial Supervisory Authority which admitted the company into its regulatory sandbox.

As Sunde told CoinGeek, the admission is a big milestone for the company. He noted that one of the biggest challenges to any startup operating in the industry is regulatory uncertainty. The sandbox will eliminate most of the concerns, allowing the company to innovate while the regulator keeps a close eye and ensures it remains compliant.

The six-month sandbox involves several workshops in which the watchdog dives into the company, its technology, future plans and more. So far, the focus has been on how Abendum is using blockchain technology, Sunde told CoinGeek. In upcoming workshops, it shall focus on complying with international and local standards, including whether its systems are robust enough to prevent money laundering.

Sunje concluded, “We want to make triple entry accounting easy for businesses to use – make it a low-threshold solution.”