Ankit Ratan is an IIT Graduate with an expertise in Data Science and App development.Techiexpert Team had an opportunity to talk to Ankit Ratan, Co-founder at Signzy
What is Signzy? and what is that one problem your solving
Signzy is a RegTech startup that offers AI-led digital onboarding and verification and fraud detection solutions for banking and financial institutions.
Customer onboarding in banks is a tedious and mostly a manual process and requires an average of seven days. Signzy, through its AI-based decision engines and back automation office solutions, enables account opening in real-time.
Signzy has developed AI-enabled products that focus on two significant areas in the BFSI industry, which are costly and time-consuming – the KYC process and the back-end operations, namely REALKYC, Algorithmic Risk Intelligence (ARI) and Digital Contracts.
Based on AI, Signzy’s offerings to banks and FIs are more efficient, accurate and insulated from human frauds.
Background of founders and what’s the journey behind getting this particular idea.
Ankit Ratan, Ankur Pandey and Arpit Ratan -cofounded Signzy in 2015. Ankit and Ankur both are IIT graduates and brought the expertise of data science and app development. Arpit is a corporate lawyer, who brought in the knowledge of financial regulations and expertise of working with statutory bodies, to the table.
The idea behind Signzy came from our personal experiences of dealing with banks as individuals and companies in our previous startups. We noticed that, while the whole banking was going digital, compliance function within the banks remained very manual and paper-driven. Banks were spending enormous resources and time in doing tasks like customer onboarding, back-office operations, which we felt could be largely automated using AI. We felt this was a significant problem to be solved within the banking industry, and hence Signzy was conceptualized.
What’s their USP (unique selling point)
Signzy’s USP lies in harnessing the power of AI and blockchain to enable its clients to adapt digitization and offer fully digital experiences to their users. When Banks, NBFCs, and other financial institutions, partner with us, they can entirely rely on our solutions for their digital-KYC and back-office automation needs.
Early days struggle.
Like most entrepreneurs, we too had our share of struggles in the initial few months of starting up Signzy. During our early days, we were based in Bengaluru, and most of our customers were in Mumbai. As a result, we had to travel frequently. Since we were primarily bootstrapped in those days, to save money, we used to travel by buses and trains. This would take up a lot of our time, which we would have otherwise given to our families or work. The 24 hour-long journeys would drain us. During those days, we used to survive on breakfast and dinner at Mumbai local stations since we were mostly low on surplus money and pressed for time.
Thankfully, we scaled soon, and today we are happy to have overcome the challenges we faced when we started off.
Funding received
Signzy received the initial funding from Kstart, a venture of Kalaari Capital. We last year raised $3.6 million in Series A from Kalaari Capital and Stellaris Venture Partners.
User base they have achieved till now.
Since our inception in 2015, we have grown working from one bank to six large banks, eight NBFCs and over sixty financial institutions in the last two years. Currently, 80% of our business is in India. 20% of our business comes from other markets.
New Areas if they are looking to expand.
India will continue to be our primary market, but we are looking at geographical expansion as well. We closed our first overseas customer early this year. We aim to have similar large customers both in the country as well as outside it in the next two years.
We have now started work in some other markets like the Middle East- Africa. We foresee a significant opportunity for growth in the region.
Future plans
Signzy’s products are focused and tailored to suit the needs of the banking and finance industry, which is a large segment, and we plan to remain focused on it for the near future.
Today if you look in the banking sector, there are 20-30% people in front end or customer-facing roles and 70-80% in backend operations. Our vision is to reverse this. To help banks reduce their cost of services and at the same time give a much better experience to the customers.
However, solving harder and tougher challenges facing the BFSI industry would always remain our primary goal.
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