SIGNZY: Enhancing Digital On-boarding Process Efficiently!

Ankit Ratan Co-founder FRS SIGNZY | Bio-metric Company | Insights Success

The digital frontier nowadays has seen tremendous growth in terms of technological advancements and ground-breaking innovation. Biometric technology in smartphones has been widely popularized and has made an incredibly powerful yet disruptive form of apparatus, accessible by millions. Features such as voice recognition and one touch fingerprint sensor, has revolutionized the mobile phone industry. In lieu of user experience, these functions have made a lot of difference in case of accessibility with ease of operation. Surfing the same tide, the banking sector is also looking for an unprecedented growth with introducing and implementing biometrics in its existence. Leveraging facial biometrics, in form of videos is set to revolutionize the banking industry.
Embracing and advancing with this tide of biometric technology is SIGNZY. It is a fin-tech startup offering digital on-boarding solutions for banks, NBFC’s and other financial institutions. It was Co-founded by Ankit Ratan – Product Head, Ankur Pandey – Head Engineer and Arpit Ratan – Business Development Head. Graduates from IIT, both Ankit and Ankur are experts in data-science and app development.  Arpit is a corporate lawyer who channelizes his knowledge of financial regulations and expertise in working with statutory bodies for the company. “We believe in running and growing our business with utmost integrity and honesty without losing the vision,” says the trio.
Genesis & Operations
SIGNZY was established in 2015. The concept behind it came from the personal experiences of the co-founders dealing with the banks like individuals as well as startups (with the previous companies). “We noticed that the whole banking was going digital, yet the compliance function within the banks still remained very manual and paper driven,” adds Ankit. It was observed that banks were spending a lot of time and resources in carrying out functions like customer on-boarding and back office operations. All of which, could have been automated with an AI for better output. Hence, to solve this problem prevailing in the banking industry, SIGNZY was born.
In a bank, a primary customer on-boarding process takes an average of 7 days. SIGNZY can enable account opening in real time through its AI-based decision making engines and back office tools. Without any delays or waiting, 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 used to take a month earlier,” claims the SIGNZY team. For enabling this, the company has spent last three years investing in a lot of R&D into its computer vision tools. It is said that, these tools have ability to recognize documents, detect forgery and replicate the eye-balling process at the back end. Also, the team has spent a lot of time ascertaining the process at the banks. Now, the automated decision making engines are capable of using hundreds of risk rules and algorithms customized to individuals, proprietors, companies and partnerships etc. All of this to help in real time decision-making.
Currently, SIGNZY has products focusing on two major areas in the BFSI industry that are considered costly and time-consuming. They are REALKYC – the KYC process and back-end operations and ARI – Algorithmic Risk Intelligence along with Digital Contracts.
The Complications
“One of the most pressing challenges for banks is to adopt the use of biometric authentication to ensure frauds are prevented and security isn’t compromised,” tells the SIGNZY team when enquired about the challenges pertaining to biometrics in banking industry. There is a constant shift of customers practicing conventional banking to digital banking. Banks will have to keep a strict check for preventing security breaches and frauds. This could be attained only when banks consider adopting biometric authentication aggressively. Banks need to upgrade their current systems and protocols to adhere with the opportunities available through the application of advanced biometrics.
Making a Difference
Working with all the major private banks, SIGNZY today has enabled over 60 financial institutions for making their customer on-boarding process digital. “Some of the products, that we have around for detecting image fraud and video fraud are the best in class in the world,” boasts the SIGNZY founding trio. The company thinks about compliance first, before it considers the products. For its partners, the firm has sorted adherence to compliance in a seamless way. To ensure that the use of its products by the end customers meets the regulatory norms and consent requirements, the firm invests in a lot of resources.
SIGNZY has won several prestigious awards since 2016. It won RBI’s award for most Innovative Payment System Solution (PSIC 2016) organized by IDRBT (July 2016). Further it bagged the IAMAI Most Innovative Fin-tech Data Solution Provider 2019. Also, Governance Now Award for fastest growing Fin-tech Company of the Year 2019 was bagged by the company. Achievements like featuring in Amazon Top 5 AI Emerging Startups 2018 and receiving an award at Indywood Awards 2018 were few of the highlights portraying SIGNZY’s success.
Eyes on the Prize
“Our products are focused and tailored to suit the needs of the banking and finance industry, which is a large segment and we plan to remain focused on it for the near future,” opines the SIGNZY co-founders. As far as the future plans go, India will continue to be the company’s primary market. But now, the plan is shifting towards the markets like Middle-East Africa. It’s expected to have a huge opportunity for growth in the future.