EnKash is one of the most prominent startups in the commercial card fintech space of India, and the only card fintech startup which is working across segments. According to the company, it is the first in India to bring corporate credit cards with multiple variants in the market.
EnKash offers a wide range of products and solutions to facilitate penetration and distribution of commercial card issuance. While at one end, it enables purchase cards for large and mid-size businesses; at another end, it offers a range of commercial cards for SMEs and startups under the Freedom Card brand.
Analytics India Magazine connected with Hemant Vishnoi, Co-Founder of EnKash to better understand how the startup operates.
“While banks are mainly focused on serving large enterprises, we aim to cater to SMEs and startups which may have varied needs but are underserved by banks in the absence of qualifying prerequisites or due to the high cost of acquisition. Commercial cards, hence, are benefitting across businesses and are the best tools to manage short duration credits,” told Vishnoi.
How The Startup Utilizes AI/ML
For a startup to stay ahead in the game, and to provide value to users, AI and ML have become essential tools. The co-founders have extensive experience in the cards and banking industry and are fully aware of the critical challenges that users face from a product perspective. Therefore, right from the beginning of its journey, the startup has been using predictive analysis, AI and ML to help solve issues that were previously manually accomplished by humans.
“We are sitting on a data-mine and are working towards using them to create breakthrough offerings, as well as significantly improve the existing ones. All this is driven by market analysis through predictive modelling and AI/ML. We study a user’s entire journey, the transaction patterns and overlay entry and exit points of our portal to understand their financial usage trends. We also study their historical transactions to understand them better,” according to Vishnoi.
Fraud detection and data security (authentication, encryption, transaction approval checks, etc.) are some of the other vital aspects where EnKash has been working using AI/ML. Currently, it is also working on a dynamic and efficient chatbot (full-scale robotic assistants) response and assistance system.
“We are working on ML and fine-tuning it to best suit our workflows, processes and various policies to underwrite and do credit assessments. We, similarly, put our energies on ML for OCR of various KYC documents, invoices and expense receipts. Since the beginning, we have believed in automating systems internally as well as for our customers. Hence, AI/ ML will always remain an integral part of our strategy. Our customers will also soon be exposed to AI/ML for their invoice, payable and expense management, and complete digital onboarding,” Vishoi said.
EnKash: The Tech Stack
According to Vishnoi, for a technologically backed company, the tech stack determines the possibilities and limitations for building, validating and maintaining EnKash’s product. Therefore, the startup has been very careful to include state-of-the-art functions, data security, fraud protection, capacity and scalability in our technology. Since the startup focuses on creating a seamless experience for users, the startup is driven by APIs to create a dynamic and multi-function offering. This is only feasible because of dynamic frameworks of programming languages and ease of information transfer to and from its database.
“At EnKash, we are PCI DSS certified and proud to say that our partner banks have trusted us because of this expertise. The tech stack is robustly built on microservices and is highly flexible and scalable. Thanks to our tech team, they always believed in building futuristic infrastructure and solutions fitting to business needs. Our tech team is working on the latest tech stack with cloud infrastructure on AWS, programming languages like JAVA/ Angular, applications like Spring boot, cache frameworks like Redis, database as MySQL etc.,” he said.
EnKash: The Roadmap
Post the launch of EnKash’s Freedom Card, the market saw a few more similar launches by some neo-banking or payments platforms. However, EnKash remains wholly focused on being a cards company, whether it is through bank partnerships on commercial credit cards, or its own ‘Freedom’ corporate credit card.
Vishnoi added, “In less than two years, EnKash has garnered an impressive clientele of more than 50,000 businesses that are using the product. We intend to grow multiple folds, given the market opportunity and cards evolving as a separate category in fintech space.”
