Decentro, India’s top Banking-as-a-Service firm, announced the availability of its Penniless Bank Account Verification (BAV) API. It assists firms to save around 5-10 man hours and close to Rs. 50 – 75 every onboarding of a new consumer or merchant, making it one of the first startups to debut such a solution.
In contrast to the penny drop BAV process, the first way of Penniless BAV allows a company to obtain the name of a bank account holder or the condition of the account using only the bank account number and no nominal financial activity. While penny-drop BAV provided considerable efficiency and security benefits over human verification, it still fails in many circumstances, such as when an incorrect IFSC number is entered or the bank has merged with another bank.
This is mostly due to the fact that penny drop verification entails sending an actual Re. 1 (or penny) from the source account to the destination for verification, and any issue during this complete flow results in a failure. Furthermore, for businesses that handle recurring payments and large-scale transactions, penny-drop verification raises the possibility of unnecessarily sending funds to a bogus account. Penniless verification addresses these issues by removing the flow of money, ensuring a success rate of more than 99% (according to the company’s benchmarks), and reducing customer onboarding time even further.
The second product, named Reverse Penny Drop or Penny Pull Verification, asks the user to make a Re. 1 payment (via UPI) rather than asking for the full account details and then depositing the Re. 1 (penny) as in the old methods. The intriguing element is that it is simply like making a standard UPI payment online for a user, and he does not need to remember any of his extensive bank account details at any time. After a successful Re. 1 UPI payment, the aggregator / financial firm can obtain his verified bank account details as well as the actual registered name from the banking ecosystem in the API response itself.
Commenting on the launch of these new flows, Rohit Taneja, Founder & CEO, Decentro said, “Since our inception in 2020, we have been driven by a singular goal of building a robust financial infrastructure for Indian fintechs and enterprises so that they can focus on innovation without having to spend their time sorting out the infrastructure. This has empowered us to find solutions and build products across the payments and banking value chain, giving us a significant advantage in having the most robust and safest data and financial flow ecosystem. This has helped us gain an airtight reputation in becoming one of the first banking infrastructure companies to launch a penniless verification module, which has a large potential to reduce costs for enterprises and make their financial flows safer.”
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With only 30+ financial institutions in India implementing these innovative penniless & reverse penny drop-based verification systems, the potential for such a technology is enormous. Decentro’s superior technology and end-to-end technology stack, which has the capacity to deliver the fastest verification process in the most secure manner, aspires to capture the majority share of the market.
Notable participants in the BFSI and fintech area, such as Uni Cards, MoneyTap, CashE, Potlee, CreditFair, and others, have built their platforms and journeys on top of the modular Decentro platform. These two new and innovative products have already increased the overall success percentage of Decentro’s bank account verification API suite to more than 99.4% in the market.
