The Money Was Always There. Governments Just Couldn’t See It.
Carolina Valadas used mobile money daily in West Africa before she joined Sharp Vision.. Founded by Cyril and Christophe Casanova, the Paris-based RegTech now manages €5 billion in annual flows across six jurisdictions, tripling tax revenues for the governments it serves.
Carolina Valadas didn’t encounter the problem Sharp Vision solves in a boardroom or a pitch deck. She encountered it on her phone, in West Africa, paying for groceries and electricity bills through a digital wallet tied to her phone number. As a diplomat for the EU’s External Action Service, mobile money was not just a fintech novelty—it was how daily transactions worked. What she hadn't realized then was the limited visibility governments had over most of these flows. The issue wasn't a lack of political will; it was a lack of technological oversight, which created systemic inefficiencies
Living in the informal economy taught her what regulators couldn’t see
Carolina Valadas spent years embedded in West African economies where up to 50% of payments move outside traditional banking systems, and nearly 80% of the population relies on mobile money for daily transactions. The flows are enormous, the adoption is real, and the regulatory infrastructure to match it has never existed. When she left the diplomatic service and moved back into the private sector, she joined Sharp Vision’s public affairs team after meeting the company’s director of public affairs. The fit was immediate. Sharp Vision, founded in Paris by brothers Cyril and Christophe Casanova, had started in the African gaming industry and identified the same gap she had lived inside. Governments were failing to regulate because they had no way to see what was happening, not because they lacked the will to act.
Operators were declaring revenues blindly, and governments had no way to check
The Casanova brothers built Sharp Vision after working with gaming operators across Africa and watching governments accept whatever revenues operators chose to declare. There was no mechanism to verify the numbers, no real-time market data, and no way to identify illegal platforms operating alongside licensed ones. As a result, governments lost tax revenue, licensed operators faced unfair competition, and players were left unprotected. Sharp Vision’s platform changes that. Operators connect to it directly, declaring revenues through a system the government controls rather than one the operator manages. The results in Sharp Vision’s early deployments were stark. Governments that had been taxing what operators reported found themselves looking at the real market for the first time, and in several early case studies, fiscal revenues increased tenfold. The platform now manages €5 billion in annual flows across six live jurisdictions, including Senegal, Benin, Guinea and Mali, has reached 70 million users, and has delivered an average 350% tax revenue increase for the governments it serves. Beyond the fiscal numbers, Valadas is direct about what else is at stake. Illegal platforms carry no player protections. Minors access them. Money laundering moves through them. The regulatory gap is a public health problem as much as a fiscal one.
Smarter regulation means governments stop counting manually and start governing digitally
Sharp Vision’s next move is into the European Union and Latin America, where Carolina Valadas says the problem looks different on the surface but runs deeper than most regulators want to admit. EU markets are more mature, the legal frameworks exist, and regulators are aware of the gaps. But the technologic systems they use to enforce them are almost entirely manual. One regulator told her recently that their operation was, in her words, very much in the stone age. Sharp Vision’s AI-powered platform automates the identification of illegal gambling sites, freeing government staff from manually scanning the web and redirecting them toward the kind of judgment-driven regulatory work that actually requires a human. The company, which was named VIXIO Compliance Innovator of the Year in 2025 and holds ISO 27001 certification, is targeting 20 or more governments and €200 million in annual recurring revenue by 2030, with expansion into the Americas and Asia alongside the EU push. For Valadas, the pitch is simple. The money was always moving. Governments just had no way to see it, and Sharp Vision is built to change that.
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