Analytics startup Spocto helps Godrej and ICICI Bank enhance customer experience

Most often than not, banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), and other financial institutions deal with collections in a very traditional way. The physical clearance of collections, including cheques, demand drafts, and pay orders, is not seamless. The process involves manpower and time and is not very efficient as it depends on call centres and field teams. 

Category-defining analytics startup Spocto aims to solve this problem. Headquartered in Mumbai, it uses technology to help players in the BFSI domain make collections. The Big Data analytics startup transforms customer data into actionable insights to help businesses know their customers better. 

With more than 20-plus partner banks and Assets Under Management (AUM) worth $6 billion, spocto has offices in the US as well. It has clients in India and the Middle East, and is in advanced stages of expansion in Indonesia and Australia. 

ALSO READ

WATCH: Bootstrapped social analytics startup Vaizle allows users to track progress on Facebook, Twitter, and more

The team 

Spocto was co-founded by husband-and-wife duo, Sumeet Srivastava and Puja R Shrivastava. An alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology, and IIM-Ahmedabad, Sumeet has more than 21 years of experience across geographies and business segments. His last senior leadership role was that of CIO Asia for Fortune 100 agricultural conglomerate Monsanto. Prior to that, he worked with GE Consumer and Industrial. He is currently the CEO at Spocto. 

“During my last corporate role, I had received a message from the customer on how they were delighted with the services. It was the final call to use technology to touch multiple lives for the better,” Sumeet says. 

“My education, experience, and passion for technology has been instrumental in starting up along with Puja, who is equally immersed in the domain.”

Puja, also an alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology, did her master’s in education from Endicott College. Prior to starting up, she was the Project Manager at GEMAC. Her last stint involved being the Tech Director at Oberoi International School. Puja is the CTO at Spocto. 

The startup has more than 70 employees, across departments.

ALSO READ

This woman entrepreneur helps startups and SMEs make data-driven decisions with a curated marketplace of scientists and engineers

What Spocto does 

Founded in December 2016, Spocto provides meaningful insights on consumers and customer data, enabling clients to enhance productivity and increase profitability. 

In the retail space, Spocto helps clients with insights, enabling them to provide unique buyer propositions for each of their customers, instead of providing a generic marketing message targeting a broad segment of customers. 

“Every customer’s journey differs from the other, and Spocto provides insight into individual customers, rather than a segmented customer data, or on types of customer profiles. Basis this custom-driven insight, our clientele can proceed on the journey with their customer, enhancing and strengthening their relationship thereafter,” Sumeet says. 

Working in a B2B SaaS model, Spocto’s services and products use Big Data analytics, Machine Learning, and its in-house proprietary patented algorithms. 

Products and solutions 

Spocto essentially targets banking and lending authorities. Besides those, it also provides actionable insights to retail players. Its marketing product, Spocto Marketing, provides insights on customer’s behaviour to its marketing clients, enabling them to provide individualised options to customers, based on their buying patterns, interests, and behaviour. 

Spocto’s SmartCollect helps banking and financing institutions on digital recoveries of outstanding loan amounts.

Another product, Trace, is used to analyse customer information via 50-plus sources, and get back alternate data for each of these customers to the client.

“We also provide a propensity score wherein the client is informed of how likely a payment is to come in from a particular customer, thereby allowing them to focus their efforts on high-propensity customers and gain more traction faster with reduced effort, or rather productive effort and minimal time being spent on low-propensity cases,” Sumeet explains.

Its eTrustScore product enables lending authorities with information on their potential customers, so that they sift through highly probable fraudulent ones.

One of Spocto’s first clients was AXIS Bank. 

“With our financial platform, Credit Monitor, we plan to educate lakhs of retail consumers on moratorium and financial health,” Sumeet adds. 

The analytics business

Sumeet says that the startup is adding new clients and geographies every day since the pandemic.

“Businesses have realised the tremendous scope of using digital platforms to run operations smoothly while their employees continue to work remotely, with a restricted scope of deliveries,” Sumeet says. 

Spocto’s client list includes Godrej, ICICI Bank, Lodha Group, Mudra Circle, Kotak Mahindra Bank, and Union Bank of India, among others. 

According to Markets and Markets, the brand analytics market size is expected to grow from $2.23 billion in 2016 to $9.54 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 28.6 percent. Players like Brandwatch, Meltwater, and Vaizle operate in this space. 

On the financial services front, Spocto competes with traditional collection agencies and BPOs. Players like TrueAccord, CreditMate, Creditmantri, and PolicyBazaar also operate in the space. 

Bootstrapped since inception, Spocto’s team size has almost tripled since inception, and the company has been growing at up to 5x year on year. “We are profitable and our focus is to create a sustainable business model, not models that are VC-focused,” he says. 

Despite the economic slowdown, Spocto has not made any salary cuts or laid off any employees. “We are looking to double our team size in the next six months,” Sumeet says. 

(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)