Launch HN: Decentro (YC S20) – APIs for Banking Integrations in India
Super stoked to share Decentro (http://bit.ly/decentro-hn) with all of you today.
Decentro is an easy-to-use API platform for banking integrations in India & Asia. We do the hard work of tying up with legacy financial institutions so that developers can integrate their desired APIs and launch.
Think of us like Plaid+Synapse for the Asian subcontinent where the regulatory complexity, financial intricacies, and local knowledge inhibit the foreign infrastructure players from operating.
This is my second fintech venture, and I started Decentro out of my own pain point. In 2015, we had launched a fintech venture called 'Mypoolin' in the domain of social payments, ran it for three years, and then sold it to a global payments company that eventually got acquired by PayU in 2019.
Throughout those five years across the organizations, we saw it first hand that integrations with banks and old-school institutions were extremely painful across all stages and categories. The average time span for API integrations with any bank ranges from 4 to 6 months or more depending on the type and complexity of the use case.
Our product roadmap is a function of the core-building blocks of any fintech company. First came KYC/KYB and digital onboarding, enabling companies to digitally verify the identity using 7 possible national IDs/documents of consumers or partner businesses. Immediately thereafter, we launched our 'Accounts' module with 2 partner banks in India, enabling any company to launch fully digital bank accounts (sitting on top of a common physical pool), collect the money via any possible method online into these accounts, fetch bank statements, automate reconciliations, and programmatically route money via any bank transfer channels into any account in the country.
Our first customer categories are SMB focused neo-banks and B2B marketplaces in the country that are looking to adopt banking APIs and digitize their money flow and customer lifecycle. Our customers have processed $3M API-based transactions on our platform over the last three months.
We just opened the beta APIs of business bank accounts. You can link multiple virtual accounts to your core business account, automate reconciliations, receive payments from your customers, and automate vendor/salary payouts instantly. No more payment-processor/gateway delays! Our pricing is straightforward and mostly on a per API/transaction basis.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on our proposition. Your unique insights while navigating the complex world of B2B, banking, and payments will help us solve the integrations pain point for good.
We are here to answer your questions here or on founders[at]decentro.tech
47 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 98.6 ms ] threadWhich are the banks you are integrating with right now? Also, what is the value proposition that you are offering to ecommerce customers which is not provided by the likes of RazorPay, Instamojo etc? Or is this more useful for companies like Instamojo and Razorpay for backward integration with the banking sector?
Our current banking partners are - YES Bank, ICICI, Citi, and more in pipeline.
Yes, this is for a deeper level of banking integration like issuing new financial instruments, fetching bank statements from a linked account directly, beyond what payment processors provide.
Public sector banks will take a while, of course. But we will taking at least a couple of them onboard.
I remember the Axis Bank fiasco when several API consumers stopped working/accepting API requests when their servers went down. If I understand correctly, you're an API gateway that makes integrations with banks much easier. Since the traditional banking infrastructure is still pretty much "eh", how do you plan to tackle these issues? What if the source API is down when a Decentro customer sends a request? How frequently does bank maintenance that'll affect your APIs occur? Is there an SLA available?
Absolutely, you have captured it well.
Yes, the traditional banking infra is definitely weak and takes quite a bit of navigation to even capture the gist of their broken documentations :)
One of the key things that we are aiming for is switchability and optionality, essentially giving more power to the companies when it comes to their API infrastructure. That will take care of both those aspects around downtimes and complete banking shutdown of any provider.
Happy to discuss our SLAs and showcase our demo in detail. We are on - admin[at]decentro.tech
Cheers
[1]: https://sahamati.org.in/faq/
[1] : https://www.zeta.tech/fintech/
- Zeta has built its own banking stack, which is geared towards traditional/challenger banks in addition to fintechs. Their current product is heavily focused on prepaid cards [0]
- As Rohit mentioned earlier, we're aiming for switchability and optionality across multiple banks, thus giving companies more power while building their API infrastructure. This will ensure there is no downtime if one of our banking partners is down for any reason.
[0]: https://docs.zetaapps.in/display/fusion/Engagement+Plan
I am saying thks because you say you interact with banks in building infrastructure. If your one suggestion can help, thousands of people would thank you. Plus it wont cost any money to banks to switch to a standard export format
The challenge with file based statements is the variation in formats as you rightly mentioned. Something that code based statements solve automatically.
Happy to walk you through a demo right away - https://calendly.com/raunak_dembla/introduction-to-decentro?...
> Our first customer categories are SMB focused neo-banks and B2B marketplaces in the country that are looking to adopt banking APIs and digitize their money flow and customer lifecycle.
1. Can you please share some examples of things they've built or link to their apps, if possible?
2. Btw, unless I missed something, the website is pretty sparse on any details whatsoever. What's the pricing structure, for example?
3. I am guessing the largest part of your work involves compliance with regulations, is that out of the way already?
4. Do you have SDKs for web and mobile (iOS and Android) or are the APIs raw HTTPS/REST?
5. I'm curious about the regulatory hurdles you faced building such a system for the SAARC/ASEAN market. Any strange ones that stand-out and worth a mention?
6. A bit about your technical stack, please? Back-end, front-end, authentication / security etc;
7. Curious: Are you also participating / participated in Zerodha's incubator https://rainmatter.com (it has almost become a rite of passage for Indian fintech startups)?
Thanks.
PS for anyone who blocks tracking domains including url shorteners (like bit.ly), here's the actual url: https://decentro.tech/
1. Sure. Here is one of our case studies with a new Neo-bank that got launched recently in India - https://medium.com/fintech-for-everyone/enabling-the-banking...
2. Yes, that is by design for this early stage as the pricing varies based on the API choice and volumes. Happy to walk you through over a call based on your product/use-case anytime - https://calendly.com/raunak_dembla/introduction-to-decentro?...
3. Absolutely. Our model is always in sync and up to date with regulations, since we work directly with the banks and their compliance teams.
4. Currently, it is all REST APIs but we will roll out web SDKs too at a later point in time.
5. I think one of the points worth mentioning is how in SEA, the money flow works differently than in the Indian scenario. For example, there is no concept of a nodal account in Singapore, unlike India. Of course, now India is also transitioning to an escrow from the nodal altogether.
6. We have shared some details here and will be adding more from time to time - https://decentro.tech/careers. Specifically, there are a couple of layers that we add for encryption, encasing and archival.
7. Interesting mention. We will check it out :)
Cheers.
Question : Can a solo developer have access to the API's ? ( No registered company ? )
You are right about the complex regulations here. It is very hard to operate in this field here in India.
Wishing you great success!
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I've been looking for a solution for transferring money from one bank account to another at scale for an upcoming product as introducing payment gateway in this is not commercially viable for a side project.
I hope the API pricing & compliance is accommodating to side project i.e. shouldn't expect company incorporation for the API; e.g. Stripe India requires company incorporation for international payments ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ even though Paypal doesn't require one (I understand that Decentro is not a PG).
There's an extraordinarily large need gap in the ecosystem for enabling commercial viability of side projects in India. Can't validate ideas for commercial acceptance, if one has to undergo numerous compliances to get access to basic financial instruments.
You probably already explored this in greater detail but couldn't you go with a One Person Company to run your side projects? From what I can tell, it's quite inexpensive and the compliance overhead is minimal.
Happy to have you explore and try out our APIs, however for real money movement, the regulations do require a company formation. As others mentioned on the thread, a one person company or llp is very easy to form and hardly takes a couple of days in today's environment in India.
I would suggest to form that since you would anyways want to do it at some point of time, plus you don't want any financial liability to affect your personal assets. Happy to help you walk though our product and answer any queries around the same or even company formation - https://calendly.com/raunak_dembla/introduction-to-decentro?...
As for Razorpay, yes, they are more like Stripe for India both in their product and roadmap. Razorpay X is a new neo-bank in the country.
Cheers!
Thanks for invite, I will definitely reach out to you soon for the API.
There are a lot of large businesses like Cred, Zomato, Mi etc. that use cashfree for real time API based payouts from virtual or owned bank accounts.
The key to this product is success rate of payouts. Every failed payout cost about Rs.200-300 of human effort in support and reconciliation costs.
PS: I am also a minor stake holder in this company.
Using penny drop APIs to validate bank account details of thousands of our Agents to ensure timely future payout.
Happy to have you onboard as one of our early partners. Looking forward to enabling even more API integrations as we go along.