Karza Technologies plans solutions for emerging sectors
Foresees avenues to increase offerings to payments industry and opportunity to serve neobanks and cryptocurrency sectors in future
Hyderabad: Karza Technologies, a data enrichment and fraud analytics firm, sees opportunities to cater to emerging sectors such as neobanks (digital banks) and cryptocurrency in the future.
The company besides catering to banks and NBFCs caters to the payments industry for merchant digital onboarding and risk assessments, serving the entire range of UPI payment platforms, online payment gateways and offline point of sale (POS) terminals.
The company is making efforts to enable early warning signalling systems with robust alerts for financial institutions to take actionable steps. With the increased use of internet and mobile, Karza believes that the identification of next-level frauds will become important in the coming years. The company’s future solutions will also aim to identify the source and clusters of fake/fraudulent payment requests and transactions.
Talking about future opportunities, Omkar Shirhatti, co-founder & CEO, Karza Technologies, told Telangana Today, “Neobanks, which are at an inception point are gradually evolving in India, and they are yet to mature where we can have the best of the financial instruments under one umbrella. As of now, neobanks are acting as agents to source savings and current accounts for banks, and a better user interface for customers/businesses on top of their banking facilities. Some of the neobanks have progressed and reached a stage where they are offering a wider set of products. We see an opportunity to cater to them in the future.”
In terms of the payments industry, the company is working with Paytm and Google Pay for QR code validation and screening of merchants. It also works with fintech firm Khatabook. On the digital payments side, the company works with platforms such as Razorpay and PayU for their online payment gateways to screen merchants. In the area of POS terminals, the company is working with payment network provider to create an end-to-end digital method for onboarding and risk assessment of merchant companies.
Tracking crypto
On the crypto currency front, he said, “We have started working with some of the crypto platforms that were proactive enough to reach us way back in 2018 to build a KYC (know your customer) layer to ensure what basic checks a bank would typically do. Crypto is largely borderless and it is difficult to ascertain who the transaction parties are. It is difficult to track how the money is routed, paid or transmitted, and anonymity remains a key challenge.”
He further added, “There has to be a pan-global framework/forum to deal with cryptocurrency and monitor transactions. There is definitely a need to come out with a solution and an opportunity does exist in this space.”
Process automation
The 210-member company comprises software engineers, data engineers & scientists, accounting for 70 per cent of its workforce. The team enables scalability in terms of its offerings. “The moment a red flag is raised, the automated processes ensure faster intermediation. The focus is on making sure systems are as automated as possible. From the level of 20,000 transactions a month, when we began our operations, we currently handle 1.5 million transactions a month. We have made sure that the manual intervention is at the lowest,” Shirhatti explains.
In addition to India, the company is eyeing opportunities to expand to markets such as Indonesia, Philippines, and Brazil, after a 6-12 months time frame. These are the countries which are at the similar juncture that India is now, he noted.
Also read: Karza Technologies helping banks to address financial frauds
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