Technological interventions are paramount in removing the barriers to avail financial services: Kapil Kapoor, CTO, CredAble

Kapil Kapoor, Chief Technology Officer, CredAble

Today, technology has turned the world into a globalised experience, and they are making fundamental changes to the operations and technology to keep up with the rapidly evolving digital landscape, shares Kapil Kapoor, Chief Technology Officer, CredAble in an interaction with Srajan Agarwal of Elets News Network (ENN).

CredAble is an innovator in Banking as a Service (BAAS) and embedded finance. Could you share your thoughts on how your technology is a key differentiator in the industry?

As India’s largest working capital tech platform, we’re leveraging best-in-class technologies and ensuring that our teams remain nimble and agile to support high growth and prepare for the innovative solutions necessary for tomorrow. To strengthen our innovation efforts and fast-track the rollout of new products and services, we’re adopting lean-agile practices, DevOps methodologies, and SRE for technical agility. Our platform takes user experience to the next level as it comes loaded with user-friendly web and mobile interfaces and an intuitive design.

We have designed a cloud-native operating model for working capital where solutions can be leveraged as a plug-and-play mechanism. CredAble’s BaaS is an open and composable platform allowing partner banks, financial institutions, and emerging corporates to achieve scalability and create innovative solutions. With CredAble’s BaaS at the core, financial institutions can integrate new data service providers and banking systems to offer seamless digital experiences and tap into new revenue streams. We also leverage embedded financing to solve the growing working capital challenges of businesses of all sizes. We digitise the entire banking journey and offer seamless digital lending solutions through platform-based supply chain offerings.

We have adopted a zero-trust security model for the entire scope of our cloud, data, and IT operations. Our platforms comply with the latest security standards, such as ISO 27001, ISO 27018, and PCI DSS Level 1.

We’ve also adopted a multi-cloud approach that adds flexibility to our platform. Our products and solutions support deployment for on-premises, private, and public clouds. Additionally, our platform has cloud portability with no cloud-specific vendor lock-in, as we support the top 3 hyper scalers—AWS, GCP, and Azure.

As our systems aggregate and analyze a mammoth amount of data in real time, we ensure data security is at the heart of everything we do at CredAble. We deploy state-of-the-art AI/ML algorithms to detect any intrusion threats in real-time, drive contextual data analytics and provide recommendations for performance optimisation. We are powered by NSDL and ensure fool-proof identity validation for individuals and enterprises.

As we approve working capital for a large base of suppliers and distributors, our technology validates E-KYC from a network of 280+ financial institutions. We offer a fully-digital authorisation process where our systems support electronic payment authorisation via OTP, E-KYC, etc.

For large-scale working capital disbursements, MIS and Business Intelligence play crucial roles. Our custom-built analytics engine powers businesses with real-time, in-depth reports and timely notifications. We also have an integration of our platform with India’s leading Blockchain network for large-scale invoice verification.

We are industry agnostic and our systems are designed to cater to various sectors and industries with high growth prospects. We have implemented use cases in FMCG, Entertainment, Transportation, Logistics, E-Commerce, and Manufacturing, among others. We have the best minds in the industry on the job. A team with vast technical expertise and several years of experience in the supply chain financing industry backs us. Our tech team comprises an engineering-focused talent pool with deep finance knowledge and the business acumen needed to solve our clients’ diverse and unique challenges.

How has the technology evolved within your organisation over the years? What are the driving forces for rapid technology transformation within your organisation?

As we are in a relentless race for innovation and sustainable growth, at CredAble, we have always looked to technology to be the catalyst for driving business results. Right from the initial years of our operations, we were very time-to-market driven. We followed lean development practices and combined the cloud with reputable open-source software to drive supply chain and embedded finance innovations rapidly.

We have adopted software customisation and integration capabilities with multiple data service providers. To develop industry-transforming experiences, we also leveraged the core IT systems of financial institutions and enterprises to create innovative and exciting value propositions for our customers.

With our tech stack receiving wide adoption and having many deployment sites, we primarily focus on managing quality at scale. We also challenge the status quo by simplifying complexity rather than ensuring speed. We are incorporating technical agility through DevSecOps, SRE, microservices, containerisation, and extreme CI-CD principles to anticipate and respond to market disruptions and shifting customer needs. We can achieve our TTM objectives through low code and NoOps interventions. We also use composable architecture to create innovative solutions in short timeframes.

Today, technology has turned the world into a globalised experience, and we are making fundamental changes to our operations and tech to keep up with the rapidly evolving digital landscape. We are creating digital business models to realise significant gains in value.

Our tech 2.0 organisation model involves scaled-agile-driven engineering processes for each line of business. We have appointed one leader to drive this initiative and be responsible for developing, testing, and product-support outcomes. We also have centralised strategic capabilities of Cloud-native Architecture & DevOps (forward engineering), Data & AI/ML, Agile PMO and Rapid Idea Prototyping set up as Centres of Excellence (CoE’s) for accelerating digital transformation. We have adopted best-in-class tooling for our tech operations to run CredAble’s cloud and IT securely and reliably. We have also nurtured partnerships with top tech providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Checkpoint, and HackerRank. We have tie-ups with new-age digital talent augmentation companies to scale engineering teams rapidly for the shortest TTM.

What measures are you taking to increase credit allocation in the BFSI sector?

As a tech enabler for banks and FinTechs, CredAble offers value-added financing solutions to solve working capital challenges for India Inc. We have built a working capital infrastructure with solutions catering to the growing needs of businesses, both big and small. This includes large, mid, and emerging corporates; vendors and dealers of large enterprises; Micro, Small and Medium enterprises (MSMEs); and financial institutions.

As India’s only holistic working capital tech platform, our 360° tech-enabled solutions suite offers a wide range of scalable working capital products to cater to businesses’ end-to-end ‘order to cash’ cycle needs.

Technological interventions are paramount in removing the barriers to availing of financial services. We are on a mission to accelerate the shift towards digital solutions and build a tech-driven lending ecosystem that ensures greater access to financial products and drives financial inclusion by catering to the underserved sectors.

As our solutions are tailor-made to suit diverse business models, we successfully bridge the credit gap and provide businesses access to just-in-time working capital to pursue strategic investments.

Marking success in the industry, please share your future expansion around the rural development sphere.

We strongly believe in making rural India digitally savvy. We are working on easy-to-use digital payment solutions that democratise financial services for our rural sectors and deliver financial inclusion to the last mile.

To increase the penetration of formal financial services to rural India—a strong policy framework, well-rounded fiscal support, and programmes promoting innovations in the financial space are needed.

Our super-app for growing businesses, UpScale is built to help MSMEs gain greater visibility and control over their finances and get instant access to collateral-free business loans in minutes. In our efforts to enable growth and financial inclusion for businesses in the country’s rural hinterland, we have built an end-to-end digital underwriting service to assess prospective borrowers in Tier-3 and Tier-4 cities. To cater to the rising needs of businesses in the country, we’re also building our existing product suite with additional offerings to mobilise credit and simplify access to working capital and supply chain financing.

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