Real-time fraud detection: How Drona Pay keeps digital banking safe
Drona Pay is a real-time fraud detection platform that helps banks and fintechs flag risky transactions in milliseconds. It uses AI, behavioural profiling, and external references to stop scams, money laundering, and mule accounts across all digital payment channels.
In recent years, India has seen an unprecedented rise in digital scams, including modern ones like digital arrest, which aim to extort money from victims through fear, deception, and intimidation. In the last four years, cyber frauds have increased by 900%, with fraudsters cheating people of Rs 33,165 crore, including Rs 22,812 crore in 2024 alone, according to the National Cyber Reporting Platform.
While digital payment instruments have become more convenient and widely used, they've also increased the risk of fraud, such as a call from an unknown number posing as your bank manager, a debit notification you didn’t authorise, or the AI-generated voice of a loved one asking for money.
“Fraud hits home; the closer it gets, the more you understand the urgency and criticality of solving it,” says Arpan Majumder, Chief Business Officer at .
Banks, especially small and medium-sized ones, are increasingly vulnerable to cyber fraud as banking services grow more digital and require the handling of large volumes of customer data. Drona Pay works to secure banks and financial institutions from money laundering by adapting and updating their systems regularly, and focusing on detecting fraud and risky transactions.
“Older legacy tools weren’t built to handle the speed or complexity of today’s fraud. We knew it needed a new-age solution,” he tells YourStory.
Digital fraud guru
Drona Pay, which considers itself the 'Dronacharya' of the digital payment security space, was started in August 2021 by veterans of the National Stock Exchange (NSE), with 25–30 years of experience in trading systems, risk analytics, real-time data engineering, and large-scale financial platforms.
It was founded by Satish Kashyap (CEO), Sukhdev Sinh Zala (CDO), and Pallavi Narvekar (CTO), and supported by a senior leadership team including Pravin Pillai (COO), Arpan Majumder (CBO), and Ganesh Jayaraman (SVP, Customer Success).
The Mumbai-based startup has built a platform that delivers real-time risk scores to help banks spot and stop every kind of fraud—from personal scams to large-scale money laundering. It uses real-time smart profiling, external references, and AI to flag suspicious transactions and send them for manual review. The platform takes only milliseconds to process transactions, with one of its clients processing 100 million transactions in a single day using its system.
“We were used to handling massive transaction volumes at the NSE—far more than what UPI sees today, so we aren’t easily overwhelmed by scale,” says Majumder. Their solutions include fraud and scam prevention, anti-money laundering, and behavioural biometrics.
How Drona Pay flags fraud in just milliseconds
Drona Pay is channel-agnostic and analyses payments made through UPI, online banking, credit or debit card, or net banking. As soon as a transaction begins, DronaPay builds a behavioural profile for the user: looking at how they spend, which devices they use, and where they usually transact. When a new payment is made, it checks if it lines up with a user’s recent activity and usual patterns.
It also factors in external signals, like transactions coming from high-risk locations such as Jamtara, Jharkhand or Mewat (now Nuh), Haryana, and runs smart checks through AI models that adapt based on payment type and user profile, whether it's a student, senior citizen, or business account.
Drona Pay also lays emphasis on strong governance aligned to compliance requirements. “We go through multiple audits and certifications, not just once but on a quarterly or annual basis,” Majumder says. He adds, “We are SOC 2 certified, and undergo secure code reviews, vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and more.”
Drona Pay works entirely within its clients’ systems—whether on the bank’s own servers, within their private cloud, or as a hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS). This way, the data never leaves the bank’s environment. It follows the same rules and compliance standards as the banks and only processes data that users have consented to share. It never shares data across clients, protecting user privacy at every step.
“All personally identifiable information data is hashed or tokenised, either before it reaches us or upon ingestion. We are SAR-compliant in terms of data localisation,” says Majumder. This means sensitive user data is either scrambled or replaced with secure codes and remains stored within India.
Real-time response to mule accounts
Apart from compliance, Drona Pay also has to remain on top of evolving fraud techniques. Its platform began as a fraud and AML tool, and now powers data-driven decisioning, enabling use cases like behavioural biometrics, mule account prevention, and other payment-related risks, for example, in claims processing or generating early warning signals.
The startup deals with mule accounts, which have been “a top regulatory concern” for banks and payment aggregators. A mule account is a bank account used by criminals to move or hide illicit money, often without the account holder being aware they’re part of a scam. Majumder says that today banks are looking at how they can prevent these in real time, ideally by freezing debit activity the moment suspicious behaviour is detected.
Drona Pay was selected as a finalist at RBI’s HaRBInger 2024 for its solution to detect and prevent mule accounts using machine learning. “That was a major milestone for us—the regulator acknowledging that we were solving a high-priority issue in a differentiated way,” Majumder says.
The startup was selected among the ‘Top 100 Startups to Watch’ under IDFC FIRST Bank’s Leap to Unicorn programme, held in collaboration with CNBC-TV18 and Moneycontrol. The programme recognises promising early-stage ventures across India, and the list was also featured by Forbes India.
Staying ahead of fraud
In the past two years, Drona Pay has seen strong growth in terms of revenue and team size. It has been profitable since its second year and has maintained over 100% year-on-year growth.
“For the first three years, our focus was razor-sharp on the Indian market, where we now have a solid presence and proven results. Now, we've started looking beyond,” the Chief Business Officer notes.
As it scales, DronaPay sees itself not just as a local solution, but as a next-gen alternative to legacy platforms like FICO Falcon, ACI PRM, and BankIQ, and a competitive force among modern players like Feedzai and Clari5.
The startup is looking at potential business opportunities across Southeast Asia and the Middle East. It believes that the core problems are fairly similar, and it has an edge in terms of the scale of transactions handled for clients in India.
“We’ll keep growing in India, stay focused on profitability, and continue to innovate on fraud risk tech—faster than the fraudsters do. That’s what keeps our clients safe, and that remains our core,” Majumder concludes.
Edited by Kanishk Singh