.png)
Building Trust, Empowering Users: Harmoney × ITP
In our new Founder’s Code series, we sit down with Thomas Van Maele, co-founder & CEO Harmoney to show a simple way to use AI in banking and insurance. When they launched their company, its founding team had deep industry experience and a blank tech slate. However, they still chose In The Pocket because founders didn’t have to pick between innovation and reliability. With Harmoney, we shaped screens that guide decisions, use plain language, reveal extra detail only when needed, and track outcomes like faster onboarding and fewer handoffs. This is how product, design, and engineering work as one team to make tough work feel simple.
Founder’s code provides a playbook for founders who want to focus on their core business while experts build the product behind it, secure, robust, and ready to scale. That’s the balance we, at In The Pocket, strive for: human curiosity driving technology, and technology earning human trust.
“An orchestrator must truly be able to orchestrate between artificial intelligence and human intelligence,” says Thomas Van Maele, co-founder & CEO Harmoney.
Startups don’t just need code. They need confidence. In this Founder’s Code episode, we sit down with Thomas Van Maele, co-founder & CEO Harmoney, to discuss how a compliance platform can be both rigorous and user-first and what that means for founders building in regulated markets.
AI That Earns Trust
Harmoney digitises complex compliance workflows for banks and insurers, like KYC, AML, DORA, ESG, by connecting multiple stakeholders and third-party tools into one modular platform. The aim is simple: activate only what a client needs, prove every step, and keep people in control.
Thomas is clear about AI use. “Use it wherever it adds value, keep a human in the loop for final decisions, and maintain a clean audit trail. That clarity turns AI from a risk into a reliability advantage. If the process is explainable, and who did what, when, and why is transparent, compliance becomes a source of confidence, not fear,“ he explains.
What Founders Can Apply Today
- Design for explainability: Pair AI with human review where it matters, and make the audit trail part of the product, not an afterthought.
- Start modular, stay scalable: Build a platform that switches capabilities on and off as your market evolves.
- Choose partners, not vendors: Look for teams that think strategically, care about experience, and can ship reliably at pace.
Ship with Cadence, Balance with Care
When Harmoney launched, its founding team had deep industry experience and a blank tech slate. However, they still chose In The Pocket because we blend product strategy with robust engineering so founders don’t have to pick between innovation and reliability. Our collaboration set durable foundations they could scale on, and it still shapes how we work together today in a phased, flexible way.
