For this week’s startup feature, Analytics India Magazine spoke to Rohit Taneja, founder and CEO of Decentro, to understand how the company uses API integrations to ease the paper-based processes with digitisation.
Founded in 2020 by Rohit Taneja and Pratik Daudkhane, Decentro is a full-stack API banking platform. “With Decentro, businesses can save valuable man-months spent on integrating legacy infrastructure and broken API documentation and focus on faster product-to-market strategies,” Taneja said,
“At Decentro, you can sign up as a company/developer, select your desired financial modules, play in the sandbox, and then launch your product or service with those APIs and SDKs within a couple of weeks!” he added.
The Bangalore-based company also hosts India’s first fintech fellowship for final-year students and young graduates. The fellowship duration is 2.5 months.
Flagship products
Decentro builds on top of the bank’s virtual account APIs. Each virtual account created in Decentro’s platform has multiple capabilities such as a ledger (to track transactions, balances) and UPI compatibility (to enable all UPI payment use cases, including payment requests, links, and QR).
The flagship product enables seamless money collections and payouts for platforms, marketplaces, neo-banks and more. It helps automate the money movement, P2P payments, generate and share dynamic UPI QR codes and payment links for any offline payment use cases and dealership finance management.
What’s the differentiator
Taneja mentioned some of the key points that make the company unique.
- Multi-bank infrastructure in the backend. Essentially, Decentro integrates with multiple banking partners to enable money flow and API connectivity, thus reducing the risk of a single point of failure both from a tech and a business perspective.
- Wide and holistic product stack. Decentro ensures to cover the entire banking and financial journey from the end customer’s perspective that is riding on top of the company using the APIs.
- Unparalleled empathy and product quality. Empathy towards the developers of the companies using these APIs and focusing on the quality of the documentation and the entire product experience makes all the difference. Case in point – Stripe vs legacy payment gateways.
Innovations
According to Taneja, there are two innovative ways to use API integration techniques. The virtual banking infrastructure helps companies streamline their collection processes and payouts and verify the identities of registered businesses. On the other hand, Decentro’s KYC suite enables companies to run comprehensive identification checks on sellers using multiple government-issued IDs such as PAN, GSTIN, Voter ID, Driver’s License, etc.
Recent funding
Taneja said, “Decentro raised its first round of funding (angel) in May 2020, followed by a larger one (seed round) in October 2020, just a few weeks out of the latest fully digital batch of Y Combinator Summer 2020.” “The second round was led by FundersClub (the world’s first online venture capital platform), along with VentureSouq, Locus Ventures, Constellation Capital, and a popular Angelist syndicate Unpopular Ventures (led by Peter Livingston and Thibault Reichelt), and a host of angels from US, India and SEA,” he added.
Hiring at Decentro
While asking about hiring, the co-founder stated, “We are looking at doubling our team strength during FY 2021-22, and while hiring, we consider their hunger, drive, proven contribution, analytical skills, and their ability to tackle integration and service issues at a holistic level.”
Roadmap
The full-stack API banking platform plans to increase partnerships with banks and is on track to strengthen the customer base by 5X during FY2021-22. Decentro also has plans to leverage different use cases by opening up their banking APIs and going deeper into the products, and adding new categories of customers as the Asian market evolves.
