Signzy’s Computer Vision Engine Process Impressive 3.5 Million Documents A Day

When the entire banking system was going digital, compliance function within most financial institutions still remained very manual and paper driven. Banks were spending huge resources and time in doing functions like customer onboarding, back office operations. Quick to realize that all of this could be largely automated using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Ankur Pandey, Ankit Ratan and Arpit Ratan founded Signzy. The Bangalore-based startup offers blockchain and AI solutions in banking and financial services.

“Even though there was no existing market for this then, we felt this was a large problem to be solved within banking,” says Signzy co-founder Ankit Ratan.

Signzy focuses on two major areas in the banking, financial services and insurance ( BFSI) industry, which are costly and time-consuming – the Know Your Customer (KYC) process and back-end operations. A primary customer onboarding process in banks takes an average of seven days. Signzy, through its AI-based decision engines and back office tools enables account opening in real time. There is no wait, no delay. At the same time an AI is more efficient, accurate and insulated from human frauds.

“We have been able to completely automate account opening even for a company which would take a month earlier. To enable this we have spent the last three years investing considerably in R&D of our computer vision tools, which have the ability to recognise documents, detect forgery and replicate the eye-balling process at the back end,” says Ratan.

Tech vision

Signzy has deployed a Computer Vision (AI) engine to automate certain branch back office operations which has the capability to process 3.5 million documents in a day and can do a task in 0.09 seconds, which would take 20 minutes by branch operations guy. Ratan claims it is possibly the largest implementation of a computer vision technology in a bank globally. Signzy products are focused and tailored to suit the needs of the banking and finance industry, which is a large segment, and plans to remain focused on it for the near future.

“Major financial institutions spend upto $500 million annually on customer on boarding and operations. Today, if you look at banks there are 20-30 percent people in front end or customer facing roles and 70-80 percent in backend operations. Signzy’s vision is to reverse this, to help banks reduce their cost of operations and at the same time give a much better experience to the customers,” he adds.

Signzy at present is working with all the major private banks and the largest PSU bank in the country and enable over 60 financial institutions to make their onboarding digital. “Globally we have a strategic partnership with Mastercard which prefers Signzy merchant onboarding solution for on boarding of customers by acquirers,” informs Ratan.

Edelweiss Asset Management Company, recently partnered with Signzy for digital customer onboarding and a faster verification process in the investment platform.

“Despite heightened interest from investors who are new to Mutual Funds, the cumbersome offline process of KYC becomes a barrier in on-boarding potential investors. Signzy’s eKYC solution and our digital processes overcome this challenge, it helps investors to complete their KYC online and immediately invest in our mutual funds from the comfort of their home. This facility offers new investors a platform with compliant processes, quick onboarding and a happy investing experience; thereby also significantly reducing our costs,” says Radhika Gupta, CEO, Edelweiss Asset Management.

Founded in 2015, Signzy received the initial funding from Kstart, a venture of Kalaari Capital. The startup recently raised Series A round of $3.6 Million from Kalaari Capital and Stellaris Venture Partners. Ratan says the idea of Signzy came from their personal experiences of dealing with banks as individuals and companies in our previous start ups. “While the sales person really wanted our business, it almost felt like the bank compliance or backend did not want to open our account, even though we were legitimate business and individuals.”

Technology

Signzy says its focus on developing a proprietary technology has been a key differentiator. This has allowed the startup to come up with unique products that detect fraud. “Some of the products that we have around detecting image fraud and video fraud are the best in class in the world,” explains Ratan.

Fintech is still evolving in India and so is regulatory technology or RegTech. The space for RegTech players is still getting defined and current players in the market are helping the BFSI sector by providing access to simpler regulations through software as a service.

“When you come up with something innovative, especially in a sector like BFSI, it is super hard to get people to trust you and to agree with you initially because you are in a high regulatory environment. I think this was the biggest challenge that we faced during our initial days. We were providing solutions, but people did not trust us. However, we were lucky to have a few banks that took the risk and believed in us,” says Ratan. Signzy says it spends a lot of resources in ensuring that the use of its products by the end customers meets the regulatory norms and consent requirements.

Bullish about the future of fintech startups in India, Ratan says, “India is fast becoming the hub of fintech-driven innovation. PwC states that the next few years should continue to see fintech firms commercialise new age technologies for the development of innovative and low-cost products with mass appeal in the country. We also foresee the rise of startups targeting different niches within fintech and AI and ML will play a huge role in the day to day business,” he adds.

India continues to be a primary market for Signzy, however, the startup has started now work in some other markets like the Middle East and Africa.

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Source: ET

Image Courtesy: TeamSignzy

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