Here’s why Fintech startup Syntizen is betting big on Digital Identity market

Identifying a citizen or customer has been one of the critical areas in India in recent years--especially in BFSI and government sectors. The traditional way of identifying was paper-based and naturally time consuming, while the entire process was not 100 percent fool proof. Initially, with the introduction of UIDAI’s Aadhaar and its Biometric/OTP verification, Indian market paved the way for Digital Identification of citizens.

Since then, this segment has witnessed great advancements in technology as well as significant attention from investors. The emergence of Video KYC is a good case in point, whilst regulators are yet to come up with clear guidelines for the same.

The market of Digital Identity is niche and unique. There are very few players in India right now who can provide the entire stack for Digital Identity. There are quite a few fintech startups betting big on this market.

Siddharth Kukatlapalli, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer of Syntizen, a leading startup in this space, says, “The key drivers of this market are compliance, high availability, security and scalability. We see equal potential in both BFSI and government sectors.” However, the benefits typically go beyond these aspects.

One of Syntizen’s Stock Broking clients, for instance, was able to see significant cost and time reduction by digitizing the verification process. In order to complete a customer on-boarding process as per all regulations, the firm had to spend two working days and a great deal of money per customer. The cost included printing of application form, transporting the same to different agents across different locations, stationary costs, travelling cost, etc.

“We have implemented one of our solutions called e-COS (Electronic Customer On-boarding System) which constituted of Aadhaar based e-KYC and e-Sign. With this, we reduced the time of customer on-boarding from 2 days to 15 minutes and the cost plummeted by 90 percent. Not just that, the client could introduce new schemes like ‘Trade in an Hour’ with the help of the solution. There are also other examples in the private sector wherein we helped our clients introduce schemes like 3-Min Gold Loans, Instant Housing Loan, Instant Bank Accounts, etc.”

The company is now targeting to offer its solutions to about 10 state governments and also targeting major banks & NBFC’s in the country. The startup recently raised pre-series A funding from Mastercard and ACPL.

Kukatlapalli says that identity masking is another area that is gaining considerable traction in the market. “With our Edo Suite, businesses get to easily comply with UIDAI to cloak Aadhaar Numbers before storing them. This can also be done with the Edo Camera SDK as well, which can be integrated to customer on-boarding solutions and mask Aadhaar numbers in real-time during the customer acquisition process itself. Owing to the regulatory requirement, Edo Suite is experiencing superlative growth at present,” he adds.

Technology is a key enabler for this process. The system is driven by Machine Learning technology and can intelligently detect Aadhaar Cards in the database, extract their numbers, and mask their first 8 digits.