Co-founded by Bhavin Turakhia (CEO) and Ramki Gaddipati (CTO), Zeta currently provides its platform and products to BFSI issuers in India, Asia and LATAM. Zeta has partnered with banks like RBL Bank, IDFC First Bank, and Kotak Mahindra Bank.
In a detailed interaction with Express Computer’s Gairika Mitra, Bhavin Turakhia, CEO and co-founder, Zeta tells us how technology is continuing to be the backbone of his organisation.
How do you think is the fintech sector going to see an upsurge in the near future?
Fintech is still at a nascent stage in India. You can expect every aspect of banking to expand by the proportion of consumers that they mean to cater. So, when we talk about general purpose lending or payment ecosystems or deposits and investments, all of these require a greater adoption rate. We will see further innovations and increasing growth in these dimensions. The overall Fintech sector in India is on an upward graph.
India is the 2nd largest player in the Fintech space, second only to the US. This has largely been driven by two factors: friendly government policies and a largely untapped market in the country. With a digitally young population like ours, we are witnessing a positive push in the segment and greater opportunities for players to venture into space. Continued efforts by the government and the entrepreneurs will only take us further.
What is the exclusiveness of your startup, that’s unique from other gigantic players in the market?
Zeta is an umbrella platform that provides full-stack, cloud-native, API first offerings that include a digital core and a payment engine for issuance of credit, debit, and prepaid products. This enables legacy banks and new-age fintech companies to launch modern retail and corporate fintech products. Zeta focuses on enabling fintech platforms, banks, and neo-banking platforms to provide meaningful and innovative services to both the top and bottom of the pyramid.
It facilitates financial services with better information. No banking platform has been built from scratch to service new-age use cases. We have built a universal issuance platform that provides for that, to fundamentally change the way finance will be used. With Zeta, the client gets a strong platform that can help them launch innovative products to cater to various use cases and that is what differentiates us from others in the market.
What is the latest mode of technology that you are catering to?
Zeta’s purpose is to reinvent core and commercial banking products. Offer modern banking experiences to your customers in the most agile and flexible manner.
Last year we launched Fusion, an API-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering for fintech. It provides the infrastructure that fintech may need to build financial or payment products in one place. Fusion allows fintech to instantly access a pre-integrated banking ecosystem, which includes access to banks, card networks and manufacturers, payment networks and many more such services critical to building financial products.
This year we launched Tachyon & Cipher in January. Tachyon is a modular, mobile-first, banking platform that enables rapid product deployment, and provides a modern UX that helps banks increase customer engagement, retention and revenue.
On the other hand, Cipher is the most advanced ACS for consumer authentication. It is an elastically scalable solution that enables higher payment success rates. It is future-ready with EMV 3DS certified, along with being scalable and secure. Its various features like Swipe2Pay, SuperPin, Powerful APIs, Advanced SDKs, Superior Integrations and Risk-based Authentication and many more state-of-the-art features.
Coming to the financial perspective, are you a bootstrapped venture? If not, kindly elucidate on the nature and amount of funding raised.
Zeta has been a bootstrapped company since its inception in 2015. Only in 2019, we raised our first round of strategic investment from Sodexo BRS at a valuation of $300 million.
What are your immediate and long-term milestones like?
Currently, we are looking at growing or business in India. We are also looking at increasing the total headcount to 650 by the end of March 2021, and half of the incremental talent will be hired overseas across functions. We will continue to look at India as a key for its engineering and product development activities, but will also hire talent for this function overseas. At present, we have major banks like Kotak Mahindra Bank, RBL Bank, IDFCFIRST Bank as clients and we are in various stages of conversation with other key players as well.
Zeta is also looking at expansion in the Southeast Asian markets followed by the US and Europe in time to come. Watch this space for more!
Lastly, any word of advice for the wannapreneurs?
Entrepreneurs are the future of the world, with more and more bright and creative minds coming into the business, are creating more opportunities and shaping the Indian economy. I have had the opportunity to learn along the way and I still continue to learn from others and their stories. If there is a single piece of advice, I can give to anybody which I believe is to never compromise on the quality of talent that you hire. Hiring people who have the talent to create their own initiatives is key. I still spend a lot of time myself on recruitment and interviews, and I have three key personal qualities– “smart”; “gets things done”; and “humility-slash-niceness”.
New entrepreneurs should stay focused and believe in their ideas. They should learn to be resilient and keep growing without holding themselves back even if the struggle was tiring. Build a goal and thrive towards it, maintain a disciplined life and it will lead you towards the result you seek.