Adam Perold and the question before the bank account

Before a bank can offer someone an account, it has a smaller question to settle: who is standing in front of it? Adam Perold built a company around that preliminary exchange. The answer would have to travel across borders, fit inside other companies’ applications, and work through a camera people already owned. A fairly demanding job description for a selfie.

In 2012, Perold co-founded Element with Yann LeCun. Their subject was biometric identity, using machine learning to recognize people through mobile devices. Perold brought an engineering education and a background in finance. LeCun brought his work in artificial intelligence. The company they formed would eventually work with institutions in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Nigeria, putting identity checks into the everyday business of opening accounts, borrowing, and paying.

The interesting part of Perold’s story is the distance between those two settings: the research behind recognition and the person trying to complete a financial transaction. His career at Element has involved making the journey between them practical.

A mechanical engineer walks into finance

Perold earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. His earlier professional experience included T. Rowe Price, King Street Capital Management, and W.L. Ross & Co. The combination put engineering and financial institutions in the same career, well before Element supplied technology to banks.

His own explanation of the move is economical. He has put it this way: “I combined my engineering and finance background to co-found Element.” He describes the purpose as delivering identity and helping societies become more efficient and inclusive. The vocabulary is broad; the product problem beneath it is unusually specific.

An identity check sits at the junction of several disciplines. The camera has to capture something usable. Software has to interpret it. A financial institution has to accept the result within its procedures. Someone applying for a service has to get through the whole exercise. Perold’s choice of business brought his two backgrounds into one particularly crowded room.

The camera was already there

Element’s early premise was a mobile, software-based approach to biometric identity. Rather than make a new piece of dedicated equipment the starting point, it worked with camera-equipped devices. That decision gave the company a clear design constraint: recognition had to live within the devices and services available to its users.

Perold’s name also appears in the invention record. Alongside LeCun, Yang Wang, and Sagar Waghmare, he is listed on a patent for biometric authentication using camera-equipped devices. The described process identifies a palm in an image, extracts features, and compares them with stored user models. The patent family traces its priority to September 2012, the year Element began.

There is something pleasingly literal about that early work. A person presents a hand; a system tries to establish a match. Behind the modest gesture lies a sequence of decisions about image recognition, comparison, and access. Perold’s connection to the technology includes a named contribution to that invention, as well as his title on the company letterhead.

Twelve million dollars, with a destination

In April 2018, Element announced a $12 million Series A led by PTB Ventures and GDP Venture. The participating investors included venture units associated with Bank BCA, Bank BRI, and Telkom Indonesia, along with Maloekoe Ventures. David Fields of PTB and On Lee of GDP were joining its board.

The composition of that round helps explain the business Perold was assembling. Banks and telecommunications companies were among the investors. These were organizations operating in the sectors where identity verification would need to become useful. For a company selling technology that sits inside someone else’s service, the choice of partner carries considerable weight.

Perold described the mission at the time as delivering identity to people who needed it, with Asia and Africa central to the opportunity. The same month, the ID4Africa programme scheduled him to speak about an AI-based approach to digital identity. The audience for his argument included people responsible for identification systems, as well as investors.

A bank app is where the idea gets tested

By December 2020, Element and Bank BRI had announced a broader technology partnership in Indonesia. The planned scope included the BRImo mobile banking application and the Pinang and Ceria lending applications, alongside integrations for financial services within commerce. Perold said the relationship had grown out of earlier onboarding and authentication work with BRI.

That progression matters. An initial integration can establish a working relationship; extending the arrangement across product channels asks more of it. Perold was describing the expansion of an existing partnership, with the bank’s applications and requirements shaping where the technology would go next.

In Nigeria, Element’s November 2020 partnership with Access Bank covered FacePay, Access More, and WhatsApp Banking. Different interfaces, different uses, the same underlying requirement to establish identity. Together, those bank relationships show the international reach of the company Perold helped build. They also show how much of its work happens inside products carrying another institution’s name.

The field agent belongs in the picture

Amartha brought another setting into view. In January 2022, it announced a partnership with Element for digital onboarding and authentication in Indonesia. Amartha serves women running small businesses in rural communities. Its operating model combines online systems with field agents who work directly with borrowers.

The proposed identity process used selfie enrollment, liveness checks, and automated processing of Indonesia’s e-KTP identity card. Those are separate tasks: capture a person’s likeness, check the live presentation, and process the document used in the application. Combining them addresses several steps that would otherwise require manual handling.

At the announcement, Amartha described a network reaching more than 19,000 villages and almost 3,000 field agents. Those figures describe Amartha’s operations at that time. They explain why the workflow mattered: the application process had to make sense to people working across a dispersed network, including the agents helping customers use it.

Perold expressed admiration for Amartha’s work with women entrepreneurs and placed identity barriers at the centre of Element’s mission. In this setting, his ambition took a concrete form. It concerned an application for a productive loan, an identity card, a camera, and the steps between them.

Hiring people who know the territory

The regional business required regional leadership. In 2021, Element appointed Ardelia Apti as country director for Indonesia and Kristian Melquiades for the Philippines. Apti had worked at GoPay; Melquiades came from Banana FinTech. Perold’s comments emphasized their experience building financial products in those markets.

In May of the same year, Joe Udomdejwatana joined as regional director of Indochina, reporting to Perold. Based in Bangkok, he came from a country manager role at Experian in Thailand. The announcement linked his appointment to the expansion of digital finance across Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and neighbouring markets.

Perold allowed himself a more personal sentence amid the executive language: “I’m so thrilled for the adventure ahead.” It is a small flash of enthusiasm in a document largely concerned with products and territories. The adventure, in practice, involved hiring someone who knew the markets and giving him responsibility for the work.

What a shorter wait looks like

The June 2022 Cebuana Lhuillier partnership supplied a particularly legible description of the intended change. The Philippine financial services provider was bringing more services online, including through its Cebuana Xpress application. Element would supply eKYC, onboarding, and fraud-risk technology.

The announcement described a process moving from three to five days of manual validation to minutes. That was the partnership’s stated improvement, rather than an independently measured result across every customer. Even with that qualification, it makes the product’s purpose easy to understand. A processing delay is something a customer can feel without knowing anything about machine learning.

Perold connected the partnership to wider access to commerce and more control over customers’ financial lives. By February 2023, the Brankas partnership carried the same identity work into open finance. Its proposed uses included liveness checks during payments and identity verification for onboarding. The sequence follows a customer beyond the first application and into subsequent transactions.

“At Element, our mission is to deliver identity to the billions who need it, to help build more efficient and inclusive societies.”

Adam Perold, April 2018

The co-founder’s name is on the papers, too

Perold’s work also extends into published research. He co-authored A Generalization of ViT/MLP-Mixer to Graphs, presented at ICML 2023, with Xiaoxin He, Bryan Hooi, Thomas Laurent, Yann LeCun, and Xavier Bresson. The team examined how architectures from computer vision could be adapted to graph learning, including ways to handle relationships across a graph more efficiently.

Another collaboration, Harnessing Explanations, appeared at ICLR 2024. The work explored using explanations produced by large language models as information for graph neural networks. Perold’s listed affiliation was Element. These are team contributions, with shared authorship; they give his career a technical dimension beyond the usual account of a founder raising capital and signing partnerships.

His public LinkedIn profile now also lists Machine Intelligence Fund. In a 2026 post, he congratulated LeCun, Saining Xie, and the AMI team on their work on intelligent systems. The connection with LeCun remains visible more than a decade after Element’s founding.

Across that span, Perold’s recurring subject has been the passage from a technical possibility to something another person can use. A palm photographed by a device. A borrower completing an application. A bank adding authentication to an existing service. The work becomes consequential in those small exchanges, when the system accepts the person and the person can get on with the day.