Meet the eight fintech startups Vizag is betting on
After three months of intensive product development, mentoring, and networking, the first cohort of startups recently unveiled innovations that could be the future of fintech in India at Fintech Valley’s (an initiative of Government of Andhra Pradesh) flagship Accelerator Program.
Through the Accelerator Program, Fintech Valley's aim was to nurture the startups and speed up the process of scaling their businesses by providing access to technology resources, mentoring on fundraising, legal guidance and market access to over a million of customers from partner financial institutions.
The programme was conceptualised by the Fintech Valley team in collaboration with ICICI Bank and Mahindra Finance as corporate partners and Microsoft as the technology partner.
The eight participating startups - Moneytor, FingPay, Incremint, Gyandhan, TAQBit, Nanobi, Heckyl Technologies, and iProov operated from Vizag for the duration of the accelerator program and worked to develop solutions for four key focus areas: financial inclusion, security and fraud prevention and customer and risk analytics.
The Accelerator Program culminated with a ‘Demo Day’. The eight finalists showcased the products they had developed under the guidance of partners in the presence of corporate entities, mentors, and investors from across the world and were given graduation certificates.
Apart from this, 11 interns from local AP universities were also awarded internship certificates for the work done with the selected fintech startups.
JA Chowdary, Special Chief Secretary & IT Advisor to the Chief Minister - Government of Andhra Pradesh, Chairman and Group CEO, APEITA said: “The Government of Andhra Pradesh and Fintech Valley Vizag are committed to developing Fintech Valley Vizag as the epicenter converging finance and technology, thereby creating a high potential global fintech ecosystem catalysing the sector’s growth in India. The accelerator program aimed to promote self-sustainable fintech startups that can create and tap large avenues of growth in the market globally by supporting the participants with world-class infrastructure, entrepreneurship incentives, and innovation platforms.”
The list of eight startups who received entry to the inaugural batch of fintech valley accelerator:
Moneytor is leveraging technology to make the fragmented stressed receivables market more efficient, improve default recovery rates, and in the long run, be able to rightly price such portfolios. It aims to automate the process using a suite of products for the stressed receivables markets.
Focus Area: Stress Receivable Management.
Founder: Ayush Srivastava
Fingpay allows customers to pay for products, services and utilities at POS from any of their bank accounts and/or wallets with just a finger scan. It provides a retail payment and collection solution enabling merchants to accept digital payments even from customers without a card or wallet or mobile.
Focus Area: Financial Inclusion
Founder: Pratyush Halen
Incremint provides financial advisors/agents with a platform to cross-sell financial products to their clients by providing them access to products, tools, and their own website/ app. The startup provides a tool to both agents and customers create a hybrid ecosystem (physical + digital) to increase adoption of financial products.
Focus Area: Digital distribution platform
Founder: Nitesh Aggarwalla
GyanDhan is an education financing marketplace with an aim to equalise and expand access to higher education abroad. Gyandhan generates a GyanDhan score that helps evaluate employability. It offers a combination of credit insights, continuous risk monitoring and unique product structuring to partner banks.
Focus Area: Education Lending
Founder: Ankit Mehra
TAQBit makes encryption unconditionally secure and affordable by developing standardised quantum systems for information processing technologies which have application in an end-to-end encryption. The strength of product lies in the heart of the technology that is being used to generate random numbers.
Focus Area: Information Security
Founder: Animesh Aaryan
Nanobi is an Analytics product company radically changing the way enterprises create, consume and take action on analytics for business growth. It offers near real-time Credit Risk Management, EWS to predict increase/decrease in stress for an account, Digital solutions for SMEs on cash flow management to help understand investment and liability position.
Focus Area: Data Analytics
Founder: Vinod
Heckyl Technologies is in the space of real-time analytics of structured and unstructured data offering high-end analytical products to financial institutions and corporates. Heckyl provides a Risk Early Warning System (EWS) Software Platform for managing credit risk. It captures millions of data points as inputs to a business rule engine and provides actionable output to help credit risk teams identify potential defaulters.
Focus Area: Data Analytics
Founder: Mukund Madras
iProov provides the means to authenticate a person on any device using their face, for ID verification or login purposes which is strongly resilient to spoofs and replay attacks, yet ultra-easy to use. The product is a spoof-proof face verification for ID matching using consumer devices through a unique, patented flashmark technology for detecting spoofs using controlled screen lightening.
Focus Area: Biometric Authentication
Founder: Andrew Bud