The ever-increasing role of technology in the banking sector plays a key role for the growth of this market in recent years. The deployment of advanced technologies by companies in this sector increasing their efficiency to a great extent. Decentro is one of the market player simplifying the integration of complex banking workflows and helping companies save unnecessary expenditure. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently spoke to Raunak Dembla, Founding Team, Decentro. He briefly shared the crucial information about their offerings, and growth plans. Read the excerpts below:
Rajeev: Please brief about Decentro. What were the key objectives at the outset and how has been your journey so far?
Raunak: Decentro is a full-stack, automated API platform for banking integrations that enables companies to launch financial products 10X faster and reduce expenditure by 80%. Most companies find it challenging to work directly with banks and legacy financial institutions since the documentation and APIs are poorly structured, and their sandboxes never work in the desired way independently.
We founded Decentro amidst the pandemic in 2020. The introduction of pandemic had turned the whole world upside down, and lockdown restrictions threw everything into chaos. There could have been no better time to empower thousands of businesses with a robust, reliable and cost-effective banking infrastructure to prepare for the inevitable digital-first future. Fortunately for us, Y-Combinator incubated Decentro in the same year.
Decentro was created with an aim to solve the long-standing infrastructural problem of the banking system and offer automated solutions for seamless financial flows. The obsolete banking integration system hampers a company's ability to launch its product quickly. With Decentro, companies can save a significant amount of time in banking integration and focus on faster go-to-market strategies.
Since inception, we have created a unique brand value. We have received tremendous response from companies like FamPay, Jumbotail, MoneyTap, Vauld, Bizongo etc that have leveraged our API infrastructure and simplified integration of complex banking workflows.
Rajeev: What kind of services do you offer? How do you make the availability of your services?
Raunak: We are a one-stop platform that helps companies save both Capex as well as Opex by more than 90%, while launching a product. We offer several modular products such as KYC & Onboarding, Bank Accounts, Lending, Cards, Business Banking and UPI Payments. We also take care of all the upcoming fixes, underlying iterations, and automatic updates without breaking any flow at any point of time.
Rajeev: What is the USP of Decentro which differentiates you from your competitors?
Raunak: After speaking with hundreds of businesses over the past year, one thing further cemented our mission. The struggle to incorporate a financial offering was no cakewalk; and more than often, business owners had to drop their launch midway, or settle with mediocre solutions that brought up new headaches each passing day.
With a horizontal focus in BaaS, we enable platforms with modular solutions that aid a business in their journey across integrating various financial products. Be it identity verification before onboarding a user, facilitating simple & instant payments via multiple methods(UPI, QR codes, bank transfer), real-time payment reconciliations, business banking with accounts aggregation, linking, creation, lending as a product, prepaid payment instruments via virtual & physical co-branded cards, buy now pay later, and much more!
We have partnered with some of the top banks in India to enable seamless API connectivity and a swift flow of money. For instance, we recently partnered with ICICI bank to offer customised business banking APIs to fintechs, startups, and corporates alike. We integrated ICICI Bank’s seven business banking APIs from diverse categories like accounts, payments and collections. In addition, our Co-branded Cards & Wallets has Yes Bank as our first official bank partner, with more enroute, to help businesses to spend wisely and open additional revenue streams.
Further, our unique multi-bank infrastructure is strengthened by partnerships with 3 of the best banks in the country, aimed to reduce technical as well as business risks. We want our customers to operate uninterrupted, and a downtime should be the least of their worries.
Rajeev: What are the key challenges for MSMEs in financial infrastructure that Decentro seeks to address?
Raunak: Everyone loves speed when it comes to building and launching products and it happens to be one of the most underappreciated things when digitising operations. Companies are unwilling to spend long integration cycles with banks that delay their product launch by months altogether. Our APIs are now able to help these companies get to the market 10X faster regularly, with a similar 10X cost saving as well.
Rajeev: How do you help financial institutions to enable MSMEs digitise their operations?
Raunak: Despite the growth in the last few years, most financial institutions are unaware of the potential of API solutions and the opportunities they can unlock with simple API integrations. India’s $50 billion Fintech industry has the potential to disrupt the MSME by helping them embrace digital transformation via APIs as the fundamental core.
We’re thrilled to be taking a step ahead in building the next-gen fintech infrastructure with new-age SME-facing platforms, like Pagarbook, SuperZop & Minko. Connected Banking enables SMEs to utilise financial and banking solutions designed specially to suit their needs in a very native manner across these platforms. We continue to encourage banks and other financial institutions in adopting and adapting a digital-first approach that would help us resolve all their pain points and unlock the next phase of banking.
Rajeev: What are your growth plans for 2022? How do you see the future of this industry in India?
Raunak: We’ve grown our live customer base to 120+ by 10X in the last 12 months since February 2021 at a growth rate of 25%+ month over month on average. At the same time, our monthly API volumes (that are now more than 5 million) have grown by more than 100X over the past 12 months since our product launch.
On the basis of the momentum, and the huge market ahead, we are also closing our next fund raise in the coming month.
To take care of the growth and the exponential demand that we are witnessing, we are increasing our workforce and hiring talent in engineering, compliance, and bank partnerships in the current financial year to double the existing value. We have also launched a new module to enable companies to embed lending & credit workflows into their products.
Covid-19 had significantly impacted the entire ecosystem. It accelerated the adoption and investment in new technology and innovation in financial services. There's a meteoric rise in the demand for business applications in financial services with the boom in the Fintech sector. Further, the growing role of Banking as a Service Platform (BaaS) has unlocked new opportunities for Open Banking.
While our customers had their own set of operational challenges, we have seen tremendous growth in the number of transactions processed and customers onboarded at an aggregate level. We are planning to go deeper across different categories including but not limited to NBFCs, lending companies, and more.
