India’s NBFC sector is rapidly shifting toward systems that are fast, resilient, compliant, and AI-ready. With digital lending, co-lending, and embedded finance expanding, a cloud-neutral and always-available data infrastructure has become essential. Across India and APAC, institutions are moving from monolithic systems to distributed architectures that ensure uptime, regulatory alignment, real-time intelligence, and scalable performance.
CockroachDB is emerging as a core enabler of this shift-supporting millisecond decisioning, real-time analytics, cloud choice, and regulatory-grade resilience. In this exclusive conversation, Tejas Baldev, Sr. Sales Director–APAC, Cockroach Labs, shares how distributed SQL will shape the next decade of NBFC innovation with Vishwas Sinha of Elets News Network(ENN).
Q1. How do you see Cockroach Labs differentiating itself in the financial services segment (especially NBFCs) across India & APAC – in terms of performance, compliance readiness, and cost efficiency?
CockroachDB was designed ground up to mitigate the shortcomings around scale & operational resiliency of traditional monolithic databases. Being a modern, cloud native database – CockroachDB helps businesses focus on building great features for their end users rather than battling with the operational toil of running databases.
With its horizontal scaling capabilities, CockroachDB can run at any scale while giving the optionality to scale up & down without impacting the application uptime. This helps in getting a superior price-to-performance ratio as compared to legacy incumbents.
Since several Fortune 500 financial companies run on CockroachDB, security & compliance is baked into the product from day zero.
Q2. As NBFCs increasingly expand into fintech collaborations, embedded lending, and partnership-led models, how critical is a cloud-neutral and geo-distributed architecture to achieving scalability, regulatory compliance, and faster time-to-market?
Lending is the holy grail to profitability for any fintech. We’ve seen the massive growth of co-lending models, which is akin to syndication. To ensure customer experience is not impacted, decisions need to be instant while ensuring the correctness of data. Further, companies building critical lending stacks need to be able to deploy their software on any cloud – private or public.
CockroachDB’s Distributed SQL architecture helps you avoid cloud and platform lock-ins with a system that can run anywhere on any platform. When growth happens, companies need not reinvent their data model to meet NoSQL standards – instead, they can leverage the familiar SQL dialect & continue to build on top of CockroachDB to launch quickly.
Q3. With rising data volumes, tighter regulations, and evolving risk profiles, how does CockroachDB support capabilities like real-time analytics, audit trails, and regulatory reporting for NBFCs?
Though CockroachDB is designed to be an OLTP (online transaction processing) database, we’ve seen interesting patterns emerge due to our distributed architecture. One such pattern is real-time or near-real-time decision making, scoring, and analytics. The CockroachDB vectorized execution engine dramatically improves performance over row-oriented execution by processing each component of a query plan on type-specific batches of column data.
CockroachDB also supports the concept of follower reads, where you can read slightly stale but consistent data from your disaster recovery (secondary) site.
Q4. Many regulators today expect NBFCs to build platforms that are not just digital but also secure, resilient, and continuity-ready. How does Cockroach Labs help institutions strengthen operational resilience and manage risk across their digital ecosystems?
Brand loyalties have already shifted towards experiential loyalties. Operational resilience is no more a differentiator to retain customers but has become table stakes as regulatory bodies expect nothing but the best from our financial services.
Today, systems need to be ‘’always on’’ and are expected to survive all sorts of failures without impacting the customer experience. CockroachDB’s distributed SQL platform is designed to survive availability zone failures, node failures, disk stalls, and even complete region failures.
The ability to fine-tune your service level objectives (SLOs) to meet stringent recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) laid down by the regulators is a superpower that very few systems can deliver, and CockroachDB is one of them.
Also Read: NBFCs: The Pillars of Inclusive Growth for Viksit Bharat
Q5. Looking ahead 3–5 years, how do you see the convergence of AI, data platforms, and resilient infrastructure reshaping NBFC operating models in India?
The more AI proliferates in our lives, the clearer it gets that financial services will not be able to afford disparate systems – one for transactional workloads and the other for AI workloads. While blending AI in customer-facing applications is becoming an industry norm, it comes with a significant premium that needs to be passed on to the customers.
The NBFC ecosystem has a higher input cost than banks, which makes it extremely important to have a simplified architecture that doesn’t implode the unit economics.
The other challenge with blending AI in financial services is a regulatory one. Purpose-built AI databases are not ACID compliant, which could give inconsistent responses that could have legal implications.
CockroachDB’s vector indexing algorithm – CockroachDB SPANN (C-SPANN) is designed to help financial services companies store billions of vectors while giving a consistent experience.
