Decentro’s Acquisition of Neowise: Revolutionising the Lending Experience for Businesses

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Pratik Daudkhane, Co-founder, Decentro.tech

Could you elaborate on the strategic reasons behind Decentro’s decision to acquire Neowise as its first-ever acquisition?

The rising demand for credit, greater financial awareness, and expectations for a seamless experience have compelled lenders to adopt digitisation. This can be achieved by automating their debt recovery and collection pipeline while allowing customers to streamline and manage their workflows. Naturally, joining forces with an innovative solution such as Neowise, catering to the pressing need for a robust and scalable collections infrastructure, strengthens Decentro’s position in India’s digital lending ecosystem. This acquisition will allow the organisation to offer an end-to-end embedded banking & finance stack. By seamlessly bridging the gap between lenders and borrowers, this acquisition seeks to elevate the lending experience for businesses and their clientele, addressing intricate challenges within the financial industry, especially the lending space.

Given the rapid growth in India’s credit sector, as noted by the recent RBI data, how does the acquisition of Neowise’s advanced collection suite position Decentro to capitalise on this surge in demand?

The lending industry is ripe for disruption in its current capacity. When we at Decentro launched our Digital Lending API stack, we observed that the crucial aspect of streamlining loan repayments needed to be added to the entire lending lifecycle. This is where the acquisition of the assets of an already established player sets us apart from the existing solutions. In an ecosystem that operates in silos, joining forces with Neowise allows us to cater to the entire lending lifecycle from end to end. We also have technology as a facilitator to help lenders collect efficiently and an RBI complaint recovery engine working in our favour.

Can you explain how Neowise’s Collection as a Service (CaaS) product will integrate with Decentro’s existing infrastructure, especially considering Neowise has already formed partnerships with multiple licensed NBFCs and large Fintechs?

With this acquisition, Decentro has added the last mile of debt collection to its lending infrastructure. We will integrate Decentro’s payments module with Neowise’s collection module to create a one-stop-shop solution for lenders. This enables Decentro to expand its offerings deeply for the BFSI vertical and start offering debt collection via its dashboard for both internal and external teams of large financial institutions. Coupled with in-house payments & KYC technology, this helps the lenders use Decentro’s BaaS stack as a single-stop shop for all such banking infrastructure requirements. Banks, NBFCs, and fintechs can use this in various ways, including as a SaaS dashboard with their in-house team for training and use. Or they use a combination of the SaaS tool, the managed services arm, and the workforce via Neowise.

The collection process for numerous NBFCs and lenders relied heavily on manual operations. How will acquiring Neowise and its digital approach to collections change this dynamic?

Banks and other financial institutions have realised the importance of engaging borrowers digitally. Lenders can leverage technology to optimise the end-to-end loan recovery workflow, including communications, litigation, billings, payments, and field collections. An effective CaaS solution like Neowsie completes that digital lending workflow by automating lenders’ debt recovery and collection pipeline. Lenders can A/B test collection campaigns (e.g., call/WhatsApp reminders) based on multiple parameters on the platform and analyse strategies that work well and strategies that don’t. Lenders can also easily track performance across the board and don’t have to rely on Excel Sheets or data processing methods.

As mentioned, the future of India’s Fintech industry lies in integrating financial and banking capabilities into various enterprises. Can you share any specific plans on how Decentro intends to lead this shift following the acquisition?

While developing solutions internally has been Decentro’s forte since our inception, we recognised the need to establish a deeper partnership that enhances our suite and empowers existing industry players. With a highly skilled and proficient team specialising in loan collections, Neowise’s comprehensive collections suite seamlessly aligns with our vision of empowering the lending sector. It combines Neowise’s expertise in debt recovery technology with Decentro’s complete full-stack payments and banking APIs, which enable Banks, Fintechs, and NBFCs to digitise their workflows across the entire value chain. The symbiotic nature of the acquisition, tapping into the expertise of both players, is a testament to effective collaboration.

How does the acquisition of Neowise position Decentro against its competitors, especially considering the rapid growth and competition in the Indian fintech industry?

As its first-ever acquisition since inception, this milestone reinforces Decentro’s reputation as a forward-thinking and comprehensive financial infrastructure provider. Our zeal to solve hard customer problems, the speed of execution, & our modern tech stack differentiates us from our competition. As mentioned before, the banking and lending ecosystem currently tends to operate in silos, where a wealth of solutions is solving for very direct use cases. With this acquisition, the differentiator also lies in the offering, catering to an end-to-end full-stack lending lifecycle.