Do you find it hard to integrate your company with the legacy financial institutions regarding the product cycle? Does the traditional mode of processing banking services confuse you with their never-ending updates? It is not just your story. Many out there face the same issue. But the story has got a twist now.
Decentro, a full-stack, automated API banking platform for financial integrations, enables companies to launch financial products 10X faster and reduce overall expenditure by 80%. They offer several modular products such as KYC & Onboarding, Bank Accounts, Cards, and Payments. They also take care of all the upcoming fixes, iterations, and updates without breaking any flow. To know more, check out the interview we prepared with Pratik Daudkhane, Co-founder, Decentro.
What is the startup / product / venture about? Give us a brief description of it.
Decentro is a full-stack, automated API banking platform for financial integrations that enables companies to launch financial products 10X faster and reduce overall 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 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(Savings, Current, Virtual), Lending, Cards, and Payments. We also take care of all the upcoming fixes, underlying iterations, and automatic updates without breaking any flow at any point of time.
How many co-founders are there? Please introduce them and their backgrounds.
Rohit Taneja laid down the foundation of Decentro amidst the pandemic, in April 2020 and was incubated by YCombinator in the same year in their summer batch. Rohit is an IIT Delhi alumnus and holds a degree in engineering. He brings in 7+ years of experience in fintech & banking to lead business development, product strategy, and growth initiatives at Decentro.
Pratik Daudkhane joined him soon as a co-founder and brings more than 6 years of experience in the space of data analytics, financial services, and investment banking. He has also worked in the venture capital domain earlier with Guild Capital.
How did you come up with the idea? What motivated you to do this?
Before Decentro, Rohit co-founded Mypoolin in 2015. Mypoolin was acquired by a California-based global payments player Wibmo in 2017 following two rounds of funding. It was later acquired by Naspers-backed PayU in 2019. After Mypoolin, he led the expansion of Wibmo and PayU. Between all these experiences, Rohit faced numerous challenges in legacy banking and decided to enable companies with API solutions that would help them launch their financial products without spending months of time in tedious processes.
Since its inception, the platform has helped many businesses experience 10X faster go to market timelines and has reduced both their initial expenditure as well as operational expenditure by more than 90%. It has created a unique brand value and is working with some of the most trusted banks in India to provide innovative solutions to its clients. For instance, it recently partnered with ICICI bank to offer customized business banking APIs to fintechs, startups, and corporates alike.
Who is your target market? Why do you think your product will appeal to them?
While our solutions are designed to enable any company looking for plug & play APIs to launch their financial solutions quickly and easily, we empower fintechs, lenders, NBFCs, neobanks, marketplaces, PSPs, Gig Economy players, to name a few.. Moreover, even a company without a dedicated team can integrate our modules via our partners to embed banking & financial products. We believe every company can be a fintech company in one or the other way and aim to empower every business, small, medium and large, with API solutions that can bring the highest level of automation. And, save them the hassle of going through long-drawn integration cycles & broken APIs provided by legacy institutions.
Who are your competitors? How are you different from them?
Our primary competitor tends to be the mindset of companies that are yet to realize the power of banking & financial APIs in India. At a company level, there are a few players in India like Setu, Cashfree, that overlap with a few of our products.
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. Further, we have partnered with some of the top banks in India to enable a multi-bank architecture in the backend and a seamless flow of money and data.
What are the future plans with the product/startup? Any new features you are planning on?
Our live customer base has grown exponentially in the last six months from February 2021. At the same time, our monthly API volumes have grown by more than 100X over the past 12 months since our product launch.
We are soon launching a new module to enable companies to embed lending & credit workflows into their products via accounts as well as cards as the form factors. Moreover, we are also increasing our workforce and hiring talent in engineering, compliance, and bank partnerships in the current financial year.