Episode 338: Rebecca Heun of Aksia: From Fraud Triangles to Reading Between the Lines - A Fresh Look at Operational Due Diligence

Dec 8, 2025

Rebecca Heun, Managing Director at Aksia LLC, blends her early ambition for Broadway with nearly two decades in operational due diligence. They discuss the importance of reading between the lines and understanding human behavior in fraud detection. Rebecca delves into the fraud triangle, emphasizing pressure, opportunity, and rationalization. She offers insights on the growing role of AI in document analysis but warns of its limitations. With captivating anecdotes from her career, she also highlights stress management and the essential nature of on-site diligence.

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ANECDOTE

Joining Aksia In A Kitchen Interview

Rebecca joined Aksia from Ernst & Young after an interview in a cramped serviced office kitchen at a 2006 startup phase.
She left a secure role because she saw passion in the founders and believed the startup could succeed.

ANECDOTE

Building Aksia’s London Office

Rebecca moved to London at 25 to open Aksia's European office and handled roles from CCO to plugging servers.
She ran two full-time jobs: building the business and performing operational due diligence across EMEA.

ANECDOTE

Lessons From Launching Treve

Rebecca co-created a kitchen product called Treve and learned that execution far outweighs the idea.
Running the startup taught her to hire experts but remain deeply involved across legal, tax, design, and manufacturing trade-offs.

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Rebecca Heun is Managing Director of Aksia LLC where she is a senior leader in their Operational Due Diligence function. She has spent 18 years at Aksia and prior to that held a series of other financial roles. We met during a recent trip to Omaha, and what followed was a fascinating fresh look at the process of operational due diligence as well as a deep dive into financial sector start up life.

Our conversation starts with Rebecca's aspirations to be on Broadway, and how some practical realities led to a detour into initially fraud investigations and other back office financial roles. A move to NYC followed and some assertive moves that led to Rebecca ultimately interviewing to be one of the early employees at Aksia, then a bare start up. She helped build the operational due diligence function there and later led Aksia's expansion into London. We dig in to the craft of operational due diligence and the importance of psychology, studying human behavior, the desire to present everything in a glowing and positive light and the importance of both reading between the lines and digging in to motivations and the reasons for certain disclosures. This gets to the essence of fraud, and we learn about the fraud triangle and the circumstances that often have to be in place for fraud to take place.

Moving then to the recent phase of her career, we hear about pivots, dialing up and dialing down intensity when necessary, as well as other entrepreneurial urges that she has occasionally listened to. Her latest passion is a focus on health, and the importance of modulating stress so as to focus on the body's balance and resilience.

This is a fascinating discussion about a less well understood aspect of the due diligence process.

Series 5 of 2025 is kindly sponsored by Diamond Hill. Diamond Hill invests on behalf of clients through a shared commitment to its valuation-driven investment principles, long-term perspective, capacity discipline and client alignment. An independent active asset manager with significant employee ownership, Diamond Hill’s investment strategies include differentiated US and non-US equity, alternative long-short equity and fixed income.