Those in the BFSI sector, be they banks or NBFCs, are all looking at automation to speed up processes. And, they have come to look for a fintech partner. “Chances are high they will have to reach out to several players to automate different processes, thereby increasing the number of vendors their teams are required to work with,” explains Omkar Shirhatti, co-founder and CEO, Karza Technologies Ltd. “Not only that, all solutions are not scalable, based on an independent entity’s requirements or, in some cases, do not allow seamless integration into their work flows.” Karza is a single touchpoint for clients offering solutions across the entire spectrum. “We identify competition across verticals of our offerings, with some key differentiators,” adds Shirhatti, a CA, who previously worked as a senior consultant at Ernst & Young, for over 12 years in the fields of fraud investigations and background checks. In 2015, he roped in Gaurav Samdaria, as a co-founder and CBO and Alok Kumar, as a co-founder and CTO. The trio’s aim was to revolutionise the BFSI industry, and make Karza a single source for all due-diligence, fraud & risk management and for all on-boarding verifications. With extensive backgrounds in fraud investigations, entrepreneurship and data science, Shirhatti, Samdaria and Kumar came together to establish Karza – with the intent of creating a unified solution to aid in creating an efficient and fraud-free financial ecosystem. Karza is also backed by pedigreed financial investors and experienced industry veterans, including Rajan Anandan, Singapore Angel Network, DIBS; Anirudh Damani, Singularity Ventures; Harish Engineer; Vineet Rai; among others. “All of Karza’s solutions originate from a study conducted by us, the founders, across 2,000-plus caution notices issued by the Indian Banking Association on the various frauds conducted across banks. The two primary reasons for frauds identified were falsification of documents and promoter diversion of funds into ‘related’ parties. To tackle these problems, we have developed products and platforms,” says Samdaria, also a CA, CS and CFA (US), who was earlier co-founder & director, Schbang Digital Solutions, an integrated marketing solutions agency, with digitisation at its core, which he created from scratch. He had also worked as CFO, Foxy Moron, a marketing & advertising firm, besides being an independent director of Spenta International. “Our TotalKYC is a verification and on-boarding platform,” says Kumar, who has created a slew of cutting-edge fintech solutions for their innumerable clients. “It is India’s largest collective of proprietary APIs that automates checks across identity, address, employment, utility bills, vehicle and property ownership related authentications through our data API pipelines built across 800-plus official sources. The platform grew to further facilitate transparency through a multi-regulator (RBI, SEBI and IRDAI)-compliant VideoKYC service, along with Amazon’s AI award winning scoring and matching APIs to promote digital straight through processing.” “These patent-pending tech-driven new-age products have helped cement the company,” adds Kumar. During his study at IIT, Kharagpur, he set up their first big data cluster. After completing his master’s with a focus on machine learning and big data, Kumar was with the global team of Morgan Stanley’s research division for over three years. There he worked on data science use-cases with a special attention on problems related to text mining and natural language processing (NLP) and real-time fraud detection using machine learning. “The platform has cut on-boarding times by at least 70 per cent over the past five years and has prevented $350 million in fraud by weeding out fraudulent applications at the outset,” says Shirhatti. “To drive this contextually, the number of fake PAN cards identified in the first two months of the lockdown in 2020, submitted across loan and merchant types, were to the tune of over 80,000 every day. This is just one authentication type across the 50 others that the TotalKYC’s platform enables”.