Why Did We Invest in Finarkein?

A Major Upheaval in the Fintech Landscape

Fintech is arguably the biggest success story in the Indian entrepreneurial landscape.

Despite the success of the sector, there is still a grave deficiency that needs to be addressed — stifled credit access. The biggest factor cited by established banks for explaining this gulf is the lack of adequate data at their disposal to ascertain a candidate’s creditworthiness.

This led to a lot of prospective borrowers being rejected. Issues of this nature usually have corollary effects. A lot of potential seekers, who might’ve had bright ideas would’ve simply been dissuaded from approaching these institutions in the first place.

RBI knew it had to rectify this problem. Thus, they came up with a solution — account aggregators.

Account aggregators are RBI-licensed entities that allow users to provide consent for sharing their data amongst different stakeholders. Account Aggregators act as storehouses for this swarm of data. A lending institution can utilize this data to ascertain whether the borrower is creditworthy.

The objective of these organizations is to revolutionize the domain of lending as UPI did to payments.

While this change was welcome, it involved major upheaval in the way companies thought about data. Now there were a lot more resources for them to identify their prospective clients and tailor products for them.

This is where Finarkein comes into the picture. Prior to starting Finarkein, the team was working with RBI and Sahamati. They were very well ingrained into the fintech ecosystem and had great credibility for their ability to approach complex problems with a builder’s mindset.

Due to their subject matter expertise, they were able to foresee that companies would need a system to help them make the most of this new mountain of information. Thus, they sought to create their own solutions to meet this need. This was the foundation stone for Finarkein.

An Early Player in a Nascent Ecosystem

Despite the fact that the concept of account aggregators was first mulled over in 2016, they were formally launched only last year.

The founding team was salient members of the ecosystem, even before starting Finarkein. Thus, they could understand the need to have a system that could help companies adapt to the new framework.

The approach undertaken by Finarkein is considerably different from the competition. While there are indeed other operators in the space, they all focus on tackling different problem statements. Finarkein, on the other hand, is an ambitious project. The team has sought to make its products as malleable as possible so it can expand its operations across several open data ecosystems to offer the most diverse assortment of use cases in the industry.

Therefore, while the industry is taking a definite shape in front of our eyes, Finarkein is already in a premier position to be a frontrunner.

Thought Leaders in the Ecosystem

The biggest USP of the Finarkein Proposition is the founding team.

The team has been a pivotal part of the ecosystem ever since its genesis. They worked with Sahamati directly, to help them integrate with the various systems and manage the volumes flowing through those systems.

This sector demands technical mastery. Finarkein has consistently gone above and beyond these prerequisites and demonstrated a stellar consistency in their outputs.

During our chats with the team, their ability to persevere against all odds really shone through. The most convincing testament to their conviction is the fact that they operated for an entire year without seeking any sort of remuneration from the company. They were able to effortlessly maintain a bootstrapped ship while keeping meticulous vigil over the operations.

The team exemplifies thought leadership in this space. They always aspire to come up with innovative solutions and refine their ideas to attain perfection.

Flexible Products

Finarkein offer three marquee products; Fiber, Flux, and Factory. All three address different needs, but fall in line with Finarkein’s ambition to unlock access to information, and venture into the previously unforeseen territories with the power of data.

Fiber is a suite of fully-managed, ready-to-use connectors. Companies can use Fiber to connect to a host of traditional, surrogate and upcoming ODE data sources.

Flux is a first-of-its-kind no-code and highly sophisticated workflow orchestration engine for building end-to-end information value chains. FLUX is the only platform that allows a user to bring most of the diverse data together and analyze them.

Factory is a marketplace of pre-built Flux workflows, each addressing a common business problem. It is being developed as an open marketplace for developers to publish and monetize FLUX workflows, and for Organizations to consume high quality analytics at much lower efforts and affordable rates.

To offer an example of the change these products will engender for an average user — an insurance provider typically needs 40–50 data points to be able to onboard their customers. This process usually necessitates around 10 minutes. With the help of Finarkein’s tools, they will be able to attain the aforementioned data points in a more expeditious manner, which would reduce the onboarding time to under a minute.

Conclusion

Post the introduction of account aggregators, the data analytics market has undergone a major change. Companies are now seeking to make use of the new infrastructure and optimise their ability to derive insights about their target market.

Despite the lucrativeness of this space, the competitive structure of the industry is just beginning to take shape. Due to the foresight of the founders, Finarkein was formed on a unique proposition — they aim to power a diverse set of use cases through infrastructure rails rather than one particular use case. This creates a distinct position for the company in the landscape.

The biggest asset of Finarkein is the founding team. The team has the right combination of perseverance, humility, and technical knowhow to shepherd the company to great success. Their ‘never say die attitude permeates from every crevice of the business.

Finally, Finarkein’s products are leagues beyond anything that’s ever been attempted in this space. The team has built a comprehensive set of tools that can help any business grow exponentially.

It is a great source of pride for us to be a part of Finarkein’s journey, and their ambition to revolutionize the way information is consumed in our country. We wish them all the best.