Kindly give us a brief about Finnate – its products and services, and your role in the company.
Finnate is a constantly evolving, modular, cloud-native fintech platform created to help financial services providers accelerate innovation as well as deliver friction-free customer and product lifecycle experiences. Offering solutions related to alternative investments and business lending, Finnate is an end-to-end fintech solution.
I lead the business at Centelon Solutions, a platforms and products business originating in Australia. I also head the customer success function for platforms and products, along with focussing on increasing the global footprint of Finnate.
How do you see cloud technology impacting the banking and fintech industry, and what specific challenges or opportunities do you think it brings?
Over the past few years, cloud technology has revolutionised the banking and fintech industry by democratising it and making it more accessible to all income groups. Cloud offers many benefits: improved scalability, agility, cost-efficiency as well as the ability to rapidly deploy innovative services like mobile banking and AI-driven analytics. These, in turn, not only enhance end-user, but also increase operational efficiency.
The perceived key challenges with this technology are around data security, regulatory compliance and potential downtime risks. I am using the word “perceived” as I categorically believe that these challenges can be overcome with the right cloud platform and the right partner, in the implementation of an organisation’s cloud strategy. In fact, most regulators in the financial services industry have already released guidelines and white papers on cloud adoption.
Overall, cloud offers avenues to better risk management, enhanced consumer experiences and accelerated digital transformation. It reshapes the industry’s landscape, fostering innovation and competitiveness.
Tell us about Finnate’s role in digital onboarding and Loan Management System (LMS).
Non-Banking Financial Corporations (NBFCs) and fintech companies drive credit penetration in India, but exponentially expanding footprint is not practical or commercially viable for any organisation. That’s where Finnate Digital Onboarding and Finnate Originate come in.
Together, these offerings leverage the power of cloud technology through integration with India stack as well as its hype-configurable rules and workflow engine to deliver an end-to-end digital loan journey for borrowers. It eliminates paperwork as well as manual efforts in operations, credit review and the due diligence process. Finnate has over 14 integrations, automated data capture, data enrichment, and it validates borrower details with triangulation, ensuring strong KYC process implementation.
While Finnate Digital Onboarding and Finnate Originate manage the process from loan application to approval, Finnate Loan Management System (LMS) processes the post-approval loan life cycle. Finnate LMS helps manage loan accounts, transactions interest and charges, collaterals, accounting and GL, collections and delinquency for both secured and unsecured loans.
What steps do you take to ensure compliance with industry regulations?
Regulatory compliance can be considered from two perspectives: first, in terms of technology infrastructure and security, and secondly, risk management, accounting and reporting. Finnate has been designed with security management at its core, and automatically ensures that NBFCs and fintech firms comply with the RBI’s digital lending guidelines.
When it comes to risk management, accounting and reporting, Finnate ensures alignment with the constantly updated RBI guidelines.
How does Finnate help firms adhere to KYC regulations and processes?
There’s a lot of attention now on the possible and existing lapses in KYC processes. The RBI has already highlighted that there may be much misuse of fintech products for money laundering and beyond.
A lot of fintech companies and startups struggle with validation, transaction monitoring, inadequate KYC processes and more, especially in the race to gain new users and then manage a burgeoning consumer base.
I don’t think we can look at physical due diligence as an answer — it takes too long and can be quite expensive for firms. As an example of how digital trumps physical, video KYC can cost between Rs 15- Rs 30, whereas physical KYC expenses can escalate to around Rs 100.
Here, again, I would highlight that Finnate Digital Onboarding validates borrower details through triangulation with government-approved ids, thus, not only implementing KYC norms, but also ensuring completion of all formalities.
