Invisible FinTech - Open Banking & APIs

Dear Listeners, in this episode we bring to you Raman Narayanswamy, Chief Innovation Officer at Trust Stamp which is (OTCQX: IDAID) (Euronext Growth: AIID ID), a global provider of AI-powered trust and identity services used across multiple sectors. Raman is an expert with over 20 years of experience and had previously served as Vice President, Humanitarian & Development (Digital Identity) at Mastercard

Most importantly a true thought leader on the topic of Identity and Tokenization. We spoke to him about the following topics/questions:

1. How digital identity is evolving beyond authentication and KYC

2. What are the frameworks being devised and what problems are they trying to solve

3. What is tokenization of identity and why is it necessary

4. Some examples and use cases for FinTech which will solve identity and trust issues at scale

5. What types of tokenization broadly and how do they fit into various needs and scenarios

6. What are the biggest drivers in the marketplace... the reality of the situation on the ground. 

7. how do we push this to the edge...decentralized identity!

01:10 - Intro

03:00 - What is the value proposition of DriveWealth and what is the tech, regulatory, and license stack that you have to support it ?

04:42 - We know that you have a bunch of customers in India. Can you talk about them in general and about the growth in investments in the US stock market from Indian investors?  How big is India vis-a-vis other markets

09:15 - Which of your target segments is red-hot right now and How do you look at the prospects of the embedded investing market globally?

16:00 - Given the tech superiority and expertise, why not a direct-to-consumer model? What drove the strategy to stay B2B?

18:11 - What kind of challenges do you encounter in integrating with exchanges and other downstream systems? Has the tech infrastructure evolved over the last few years making it easier?

22:55 - What are the regulatory, business and technology barriers in moving to a real-time/near-real-time experience in buying stocks from overseas exchanges?

27:18 - If a company is interested in partnering with you, how should they go about it? How do they get access to your tech, how can they try it out and what kind of integration timeframes are we talking about?

31:10 - Conclusion

01:10 – Context and Guest Intro

04:45 - With the prevailing focus on partnership-led and marketplace-led business models in the market, what role do technology service providers play in helping banks and FIs support these new models?

14:25 - There are a number of digital transformation programs that run in a bank at any given point in time. If we take just two of them – transformation of core systems and increasing accessibility of services by means of APIs, how do the two get connected? What are the dependencies?

26:17 - Banks are slow in their transition to cloud and sometimes, in their defense, due to the right reasons such as regulatory ambiguity and mission criticality of several systems. However, the pace has picked up in the last couple of years. What are some of the barriers for cloud adoption in banks and how is this scenario changing from your experience?

35:10 - As a leading payments solution provider, within the context of emerging markets like India and SE Asia, what are the 2 most prominent shifts/trends that you are observing. Can you answer that both from the consumers’ and merchants’ point of view?

40:44 - In MEDICI’s BaaS report which we published a couple of months back, we observed close to 60 BaaS providers globally – some global and plenty of regional providers. How are technology platform providers like FIS placed to compete with these BaaS focussed companies? How do you differentiate in the market?

46:43 - For our listeners, what are the flagship offerings of FIS for banks and fintechs and what are your strategic priorities for these segments over the next 2 years?

50:37 - Conclusion

Cashfree is India’s leading bulk payouts and payment gateway solution. Cashfree is backed by Y Combinator and incubated by Paypal.

02:45 - What prompted you to focus on a niche area with bulk payouts. What were the insights that led you to this decision? How does it improve upon the traditional payouts and collections methods through banking channels?

12:50 - Cart abandonment, transaction success rates, reconciliation, receivables, fraud management, and so goes the list of issues for merchants. What are the additional responsibilities that a payments intermediary like Cashfree can assume to make life easier for online merchants to grow their business?

17:30 - Regulation - With PAs and PGs becoming systemically important how do you look at the need for regulation? Does it help to create a level playing field with banks? What constraints do current regulations pose if any? What would you expect from the regulator?

23:45 - Reasons for your expansion into international markets when the sheer size of the Indian market itself might offer you growth opportunities

27:50 - About SBI’s strategic investment in Cashfree. What benefits does this partnership bring to Cashfree? What does SBI aim to achieve out of this partnership?

34:50 - So, what are the big problem statements that are still unresolved? What are the next set of trends and innovations that one can expect in B2B payments?

Embedded finance is the next big thing. We expect that in the next 2-3 years, any app - consumer or enterprise - could be an access point for credit. Pavitra explains the 3-point framework that Kudos Finance follows to onboard partners, providing end-to-end lending infrastructure as a service, and much more. Listen in!

01:30 - Briefly explain your journey as an entrepreneur. What motivated you into credit and finance?

03:00 - Was Kudos a tech-first NBFC at the outset and if not, what motivated you to morph into a tech-driven lender?

10:25 - What is your target segment? How much of verticalization have you built into the platform to support the specific products and processes of the segments you address?

14:30 - Your tech stack and architecture? - Organic build Vs Off-the-shelf?

20:00 -  What kind of due diligence should be exercised by lenders while onboarding partners especially considering the recent events of online lending scams that we have seen?

22:20 – Time taken to integrate with the Kudos platform and value

30:10 - What are the key problems to be solved for access to credit to improve for businesses in India today?

35:45 – How well are lenders leveraging digital data generated over the years, to assess risk better and bring credit to the bottom of the pyramid?

39:15 - If a company is interested in partnering with you, how should they go about it? How do they get access to your tech, how can they try it out and what kind of integration timeframes are we talking about?

Check out the API documentation of Kudos Finance here: https://docs.kudosfinance.in/docs/

In this episode on banking as a service for business banking, Rohit explains the typical challenges in stitching the front and back end parts of the BaaS chain, gaps in the market, and the overall outlook for BaaS.

02:00 - Your entrepreneurial journey and how Decentro was setup.

07:12 – What role does Decentro play in the FinTech ecosystem?

10:04 - What are some of the problem statements that you are trying to solve on priority? What does your roadmap look like

11:40 – Maturity of APIs exposed by back end partners.

13:42 – Considering the evolution of the supply chain model in the software world and the growth of consumer tech companies, where do you think the growth is going to come from for BaaS.

17:19 - What are the most common and the most innovative use case your partners have built?

21:50 - What are the challenges you run into in the course of integrating with the ecosystem – both sides (back end partners and consuming partners)

28:17 - What is your geo focus and how do you propose to execute the expansion given the effort in back end integrations?

33:52 - If a company is interested in partnering with you, how should they go about it? How do they get access to your tech, how can they try it out and what kind of integration timeframes are we talking about?

In this episode of Invisible FinTech, Sujatha Mohan, Senior Director at FIS Global, talks about the strategic importance of open banking and BaaS to banks and why banks can not side-step governance and due diligence while working through partnerships.

02:00 - Evolution of open banking and BaaS in India. As far as adoption and maturity is concerned, have banks lived up to their potential in the last 7-8 years?

11:30 - The strategic importance of open banking for banks

22:15 - View on open banking as a regulation (as is followed by many markets) Vs open banking as a market-led initiative? Do you agree with the current approach in India? (building an open digital foundation and leaving it to the ecosystem to collaborate and drive adoption)?

31:55 - How do you measure the success of a BaaS/Open Banking initiative in a bank, over time? Is it fair to say that all the work done by banks on the tech side to enable this hasn’t fully reflected in product innovation until now? (barring payments)?

37:10 - What role does FIS play in enabling the backend rails that support innovation in financial services? How do you differentiate yourself from some of the nimble B2B2X startups around (like independent BaaS companies)? How do you work with the rest of the ecosystem?

43:25 - What is the best way to reach FIS to engage in a partnership?

Apollo Finvest positions itself as the AWS of lending in India with the capability to enable any company to offer lending within 48 hours. A technologist at heart, Mikhil speaks about the vision of the company and the hard work that goes into building a platform which is fit to purpose across various client segments, among many other things.

01:18 - What kind of lending capabilities does the platform offer? Tell us a little bit more about ‘enabling any company to offer lending in 48 hours’

14:50 – What kind of companies do you provide capital with – how young, how mature?

17:38 – What should companies do if they are interested in partnering with you?

20:50 - Can we discuss a bit in detail your tech stack and architecture? - What is the adoption of white-labeled consumer apps considering most companies prefer to build this themselves.

24:53 – How can companies differentiate themselves from other partners on your platform. What is the level of configurability to support this?

27:50 – How do you manage processes that are complex orchestrations – E.g. opening accounts. How much of that burden are you taking away from the partner

34:35 – How much of your platform did you build grounds up Vs renting/buying

38:15 - Can you explain a bit about the asset reconstruction and loan securitization services you have? This does not seem like a typical FinTech play. What is the target segment here and how does it work?

43:33 – Where do you think collections technology is today in India?

45:21 – Pharma, OTT, and now Banking/Lending – 10X engineer?

48:03 – The potential for account opening as a service

In this episode, MEDICI talks to Prajit Nanu, CEO & Co-founder of Nium.

Nium is one of the few BaaS platforms with a global presence. The best way to look at Nium is like a universal plug to financial services. In this conversation, Prajit talks about the journey from InstaRem to Nium, the approach to scaling across different markets, strategies to do so, the significance of human capital, and more...

01:45 – How do you describe the opportunity in BaaS

04:50 – What businesses and segments are the most demand for BaaS services coming from

09:13 – Nium’s offerings, capabilities, and coverage

15:17 – What are the top 2-3 aspects that help a platform like Nium scale globally, keeping costs under control and drawing economies of scale

22:40 – Significance of M&A to growth. Considerations in organic Vs inorganic growth

25:15 - The importance of human capital. What functions are more important than others?

30:07 – Reasons for pulling out of Singapore digital banking license application and views on neobanking

36:14 – What keeps you up at night, unsolved challenges…

38:40 – Future outlook. Large BaaS platform or a large B2C financial services company?

In this episode, MEDICI talks to Dr. Jorg Howein, Chief Product Officer, and a member of the management board at Solarisbank. 

Solarisbank is the first Banking-as-a-Service platform with a full banking license that enables companies to offer their own financial products. In this conversation, Jorg talks about some of the early decisions that made them the defacto B2B2X option in Europe, architectural considerations in evolving the platform, the role of FinLeap in their success, and more.

Please bear with us for the brief audio quality issue between 20:00 and 23:35

01:13 - Brief introduction of Dr. Jorg Howein and Solarisbank

04:25 - How different is the life of a CPO in a BaaS company

08:28 - How do partners influence business strategy and platform roadmap

12:30 - The choice to be a licensed banking platform Vs partnering with banks

16:10 - Why not a direct to consumer/business neobanking service?

21:45 - How is the product strategy and roadmap for a BaaS company different from that of a challenger bank or a neobank

23:35 - Challenges faced in scaling to new verticals and geographies

27:54 - (Listener question from Nikhil Kurhe, Founder, Finarkein Analytics) Drivers behind offering digital asset custodial services

31:07 - Choice to built the core platform Vs buy or rent off the shelf

35:42 - What role did FinLeap play in the setup and success of Solarisbank

38:26 - Future outlook and trends in BaaS

41:33 - What percentage of partners are non-financial services companies

In this episode, MEDICI talks to Nikhil Kumar, Cofounder, Setu. Setu provides modular APIs for FinTechs to embed financial services capabilities into their apps. In this conversation, Nikhil talks about the ambitions of Setu, challenges in operating with the ecosystem and why he thinks the only way for FinTechs large and small to succeed is distinct value accrual in the value chain

01:55 - Genesys and the role Setu plays in the India FinTech ecosystem

10:53 - Problem statements that Setu is addressing and how do you prioritize it in a scenario with large demand-supply gaps

19:30 - Operational and technology challenges in working and integrating with partners, how is it improving with standardization

27:05 - With more standardization and improving availability of Fin. Infra APIs, how do you see small and newer fintech companies competing with larger players like BigTech and verticalized SaaS companies

33:45 - How can companies stand apart even as everyone moves towards a standardized way of accessing products and services from their backend partners. How can they do this beyond user experience and distribution

36:50 - How can new intermediaries like Account Aggregators and Loan Service Providers that are emerging out of public good initiatives like AA and OCEN run sustainable businesses. Will the increasing number of intermediaries increase transaction cost

MEDICI talks to Madhu, Founder, YAP about their role in the financial-infrastructure-as-a-service ecosystem, how FinTechs are now able to easily subsume financial services capabilities within their apps and how banks are keen to collaborate with verticalized API platforms to widen their reach.

In this episode we cover:

- Legacy providers and limitations with older models

- The definitive value that Financial Infrastructure API platforms deliver 

- Business services landscape 

- Global provider and platform landscape and regional drivers for adoption

- Monetization possibilities and revenue outlook

- Future horizon