This is great. There's so much potential in this market. Congratulations on the launch! I remember another YC-backed Indian startup https://authlayer.com which started out doing what Decentro is doing, but it seems like they've morphed into a DeFi startup. Anyways...

> 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/

Thanks! Yes, we know the Authlayer (now Zefi) guys very well as fellow founder friends.

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.

Congratulations on the launch Decentro team!

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.

Thanks Abhishek!

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 returning my query, unfortunately the experience of incorporating even OPC/LLC varies widely between a Tier 1 city and Tier 2/3 cities or lower in India. I ran my previous startup as Pvt. Ltd. company for 5 years and much of my effort was spent on being complaint (partly because of the introduction of new Company laws, GST etc.), So you understand my apprehension, But things must have more or less settled now.

Thanks for invite, I will definitely reach out to you soon for the API.

Sure. Anytime!

I have been using Cashfree.com (another YC grad) for handling API based payouts and collections for our marketplace. Pretty stable.

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.

> shouldn't expect company incorporation

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.

That is a recommended route, but unfortunately experience of incorporation including OPC/LLP is vastly different from Tier1 city or in Tier2/Tier3 cities even though on paper even Pvt. Ltd. company can be launched by an individual without any middlemen through MCA.

See also: https://razorpay.com/x/

That's a PG, a HN alum, a good one too and I use them for couple of my services; But even they require special approval for International transactions last time I checked.

Razorpay X is a neo-bank and not a payment gateway?

Apologies, I didn't see the URL properly.

Love this! Amazing stuff happening in the fintech space in India.

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?

Thanks Anand!

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

Interesting product. Seems like you are attempting to do in India what Stripe has done in the US.

Which 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?

Thanks Phillip! Yes, there are few similarities with some features of Stripe, although we don't do card processing (payment gateway). Our transactional APIs essentially enable seamless movement from bank to bank.

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.

Thank you for the answers and congratulations on this venture!

All private banks up there? How has been your experience with public sector banks so far ?

Hi Abhishek,

Public sector banks will take a while, of course. But we will taking at least a couple of them onboard.

Nice! This immediately reminded me of the Account Aggregator[1] framework and ecosystem that RBI is planning to introduce into India's fintech space (apparently the next big thing after UPI). How does your product differ from it exactly?

[1]: https://sahamati.org.in/faq/

Thanks, @plibither8! Think of AA as a pipe between multiple Indian banks and govt. institutions where data is exchanged. We're helping companies and fintechs build custom banking & payment workflows using our APIs.

Thank you for the response. Congratulations and all the best! :)

How does your product differ from (or) compare with Fusion by Zeta[1] ?, They look pretty much the same to me, but Zeta seems to cover more workflows.

[1] : https://www.zeta.tech/fintech/

Hey Karsinkk, You're right; there is some overlap between Zeta & Decentro.

- 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 dont know anyone in the banking industry who can do a meaningful change but can you as a team suggest some sort of standard on bank statments? As a person who has to stare at them all day, i find it stupid all banks in india have different formats, some use total, some dr cr, some running net and other nonsense. Thats fine on paper but digital versions are even worse. None are machine readable. I want a statement which can be fed into excel or python or whatever.

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

Great point! This is actually one of the key challenges that we are solving, via our direct account integrations.

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?...

Congratulations! Great work by Team Decentro. Happy to be one of the early Customers and it has been seamlessly good so far.

Using penny drop APIs to validate bank account details of thousands of our Agents to ensure timely future payout.

Thanks Darpan!

Happy to have you onboard as one of our early partners. Looking forward to enabling even more API integrations as we go along.

This is exactly what I was looking for, I dont have a company registered but trying a POC. Would love to chat further. I have signed up in the form and would be happy if you reach out to me as well.

Thanks Jay! Looking forward to connecting.

I understand you are currently operating in India but eventually targeting the Asian subcontinent. How does your expansion roadmap look like?

ClearScore India was killed by nonsensical legacy API integrations and poor returns. Hope Decentro has better luck!

Congrats Rohit!

You are right about the complex regulations here. It is very hard to operate in this field here in India.

Wishing you great success!

Thanks a lot!

Awesome !

Question : Can a solo developer have access to the API's ? ( No registered company ? )

Hey, we're only offering the APIs to people who are building products. Let's talk though. Please feel free to reach out to us via the typeform on our website. Cheers!

For easy access, here is the form :) https://decentro.typeform.com/to/dJ6Dm1

How would OCEN impact you?

Hi Aditya, thanks for asking. OCEN is more a protocol than a product. Akin to UPI. It will require the APIs to be integrated into the system. We are a registered Technology Service Provider on the OCEN framework. We will help organisations integrate and get on the OCEN framework.

This is really great. Would be signing up soon.

Thanks! Looking forward to it.

More power to you and team, Rohit!

Thanks Varun!