The Fintech industry is gaining a lot of traction. Of the several use cases that it has, Fintech has got the most visibility in payment gateways, especially with the emergence of UPI. It has dramatically changed the way transactions are conducted. It has also been explored in the credit sector – both in terms of new ways to evaluate risk as well as P2P lending.
Also, over the last few years, there has been an emergence of Platform-as-a-Service – which allows existing B2C players to enhance their services. This service is expected to make a significant change in digital adoption.
With a similar vision, Mumbai-based Fintso is providing a backbone for enabling a financial entrepreneur to scale the business. The company offers a holistic service and product basket by increasing client engagement, providing execution and operations support and helping them concentrate on their core activities, by leveraging the Fintso API led platform. To gain more insights into the company and how it is providing a backbone to the entrepreneurs, Analytics India Magazine caught up with George Mitra, who is the CEO and Co-founder at Fintso.
Founded in 2019 by George Mitra and Rajan Pathak, Fintso is an API-based Platform-as-a-Service that aims at providing smart solutions for the financial advisory ecosystem in India. Mitra stated, “The startup is a next-generation B2B2C provider to the finance industry for smart solutions and allied services aimed at the ecosystem players.”
The company allows manufacturers and vertical aggregators to create a virtual omnichannel for distribution and provide the crucial linkage to product manufacturers, who are finding it difficult to efficiently service the large pockets of customers spread across the country.
Flagship Products
The API-based Platform-as-a-Service expands to cater to various needs, adding on more services and third party financial products, based on the data analytics that the actual users provide.
Mitra explained, “It starts from the basic premise of taking over the back or mid-office functions that the entrepreneur’s existing business caters, and offering a much better digital architecture to engage with the clients – without taking over the identity of the entrepreneur.” He added that from this, it expands to enhancements that the entrepreneur can implement to increase their Share of Wallet by providing execution capabilities. “All this is done in tandem with a) domain knowledge b) data analytics,” he said.
How Is It Different From Other Products In The Market?
According to Mitra, the combination of deep domain knowledge that the core team has, and the type of tech solutions the company uses, makes Fintso unique in its vision as well as offering in India. The company claims to have the domain knowledge to look at the needs as “solution sets”.
Fintso helps the entrepreneur with the framework and helps them in showing the benefits to their clients. The company also ensures that they have the execution tools to implement any product choices, going beyond mutual funds.
Use of AI & Ml at Fintso
Currently, Fintso utilises the following AI and ML techniques-
- The company is using BOTs and the “Automation Anywhere” tools to upload daily files from RnT services that come to the subscribers of their clients. This enables the company to load thousands of transactions and update records of the clients (in their App) as well as for the subscribers.
- AI is being used in the Advisory function. It uses Regression analytics to run the algorithms that are required to make fund selection and to create portfolios for different client risk levels.
- The Entire testing of the platform has been done using Selenium scripts to do regression testing. The structure of the platform is optimised for allowing Big Data Analytics.
Core Tech Stack
At the core, Fintso is using a fully serverless Platform design, AWS Cloud services and utilising the Lambda functions of AWS. The company is leveraging cloud infrastructure (by AWS) to host the platform that allows utilising a lot of the cutting-edge native security features including cryptography and built-in web application firewalls. It further enables the company to create layer 7 rules for the web application traffic, encrypting and compartmentalising data before storing it.
Besides the RDS / S3 buckets, the company is utilising the RedShift database that allows performing big data analytics. The back-end is in Python, and the front-end is using React JS. Also, the company has both an app and a web-based front-end. The configuration allows Fintso to dynamically scale up and be elastic in resource usage, depending on the load they are facing.
How Fintso Is Helping To Fight The Pandemic
Currently, Fintso has allowed the users a “Low Touch” business model which includes the use of different communication channels. It provides the ability to absorb large data to give actionable insights and to help equip the advisor to deliver solutions that help clients diversify out more effectively, as well as lower their execution costs.
Tackling Hiring
Mitra shared, “The Core team has been in the industry for a fairly long time. Due to this, hiring key personnel, be it in the Advisory, or Operations, or tech domain, has not been that much of a challenge.” He added that at present, they are grooming, training a group of new talent, especially on the tech side, that will help in the delivery of the next wave of solutions.
Future Roadmap
In the coming years, Fintso is planning to be at the forefront of organising the fintech sector by helping existing entrepreneurs be able to provide solutions for their clients. They are planning to retain the independence of the existing entrepreneurs and taking on the old organised players more effectively by becoming much more relevant to their clients.
