Decentro, one of India’s leading API platforms for banking integrations, today announced a key integration with the Silicon Valley-based conversational messaging unicorn, Gupshup. This will enable large and small NBFCs, fintechs, and banks to launch payments, banking and lending services to their customers through a simple, convenient conversational experience.
With this technology, consumers will be able to get loans, complete KYC verification or make payments quickly and easily through Whatsapp or other chat apps, without needing to download any app. Companies can leverage the entire universe of banking & financial APIs offered by Decentro along with the wide range of conversational APIs offered by Gupshup.
This partnership and integration is aimed at creating a massive impact for the potentially untapped 200+ million new-age users of banks, fintechs, marketplaces, and lenders in India. The fintech market in the country is currently valued at $31 billion and is expected to grow to $84 billion by 2025. Meanwhile, Whatsapp & chat based applications are emerging as the go-to platforms for customer engagement and support, with enterprise use of Conversational Messaging API set to grow by 5400% in the next three years, according to market research firm Mobilesquared. Interestingly, Decentro’s transaction volumes and customers have been growing exponentially over the past few months, with their monthly GMV (Total transaction value) crossing $500M on an annual basis.
This combination of a powerful financial back-end with a delightful, conversational front-end enables neobanks and fintech companies to launch disruptive new services with amazing speed. More importantly, this eliminates the need for fintech businesses to expensively develop, launch and market their own app, instead delivering the experience in the user’s own messaging app.
On the announcement of the partnership, Rohit Taneja, Founder & CEO, Decentro, said, “In a digital-first and hyper-connected world, customers expect a seamless and native experience for every interaction. Chat-based interfaces like Whatsapp & Telegram are becoming deeply embedded into our daily lives with every passing day and it is highly powerful to be able to create a future where your financial activity might be serviced fully over a chat. We’re super excited to join hands with Gupshup, one of the leaders and pioneers in this space, in our ambitious journey to offer fintechs and legacy institutions the power to build engaging consumer experiences via conversational banking.”
The partnership comes at a time when the pandemic impact has catalysed a digital-first approach to everything. Companies offering financial services are looking to offer a combination of social and digitally native banking solutions, to stay ahead of the curve in terms of engagement. And, when it comes to customer engagement very few could doubt the potential of Whatsapp, a messaging app used by a whopping 340 million users in India.
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On the announcement of the partnership, Mr. Beerud Sheth, Co-founder & CEO, Gushup said, “With the rapid growth in conversational messaging, this is the right time for NBFCs, fintechs, and banks to leverage popular messaging channels making it easy to acquire new customers, onboard them, and deeply engage with them using Conversational Fintech . We have found Decentro to be a great partner with their horizontal and deeply embedded Banking-as-a-service approach, product first mindset and a high focus on developer & customer experience.”
Decentro along with Gupshup aims to enable conversational banking and financial workflows for companies and bring a rich conversational experience-building tool kit for any use case to institutions across the banking and finance industry. Any company can sign up with Gupshup, and start using the messaging APIs, to launch workflows via a browser or any chat based app in a matter of just a couple of weeks.
Here is what Pratekk Agarwaal, a common advisor to Gupshup and Decentro has to say about this partnership – “Being an Advisor to both the companies, I see great synergies between these two teams’ complementary products and knowledge. With this partnership, we are helping financial institutions process all types of use cases from verified Lead Generation , payments, loan approvals , servicing and collections for institutions. The ultimate goal for us is to make every consumer’s financial journey as simple as a conversation over a chat.”
