By Hemant Kashyap
TrustCheckr was founded by Adhip Ramesh and Shivraj Harsha in 2017 as a platform for preventing fraud.
IIFL Securities and Rangsons have invested INR 6 Cr in the startup’s Pre-Series A investment round (NR Group)
Products developed by TrustCheckr assist banks and NBFCs detect fake digital identities throughout the onboarding process..
UPI recorded 5.4 billion transactions in February, a new monthly record and an increase of about 20% over February 2022. UPI executed transactions totaling a staggering INR 9.6 trillion as a result of these transactions, marking yet another record-breaking surge of around 20 percent.
The number of banks and NBFCs participating in India’s digital payments ecosystem continues to expand, not only in terms of the volume of transactions it processes or the amount of money it moves.
As per the most recent numbers, India has 50 Payment Service Provider companies (PSP companies) and 263 Issuers, bringing the total number to 313 organizations.
As a result, the lending technology sector has grown at an unprecedented rate. By 2023, India’s digital lending business is expected to have grown from $9 billion in 2012 to $150 billion in 2020, according to a report from Statista.
In the first three months of 2022, Fintech businesses raised $1.8 billion in the financing, placing them third in fundraising behind Enterprise tech and eCommerce.
Digital payment fraud is getting more sophisticated and quicker to execute as a result of the rapid advancement of technology. This type of scam is the most widespread, with companies plagued by bogus profiles that take out loans and then vanish, much to the annoyance of these banks and NBFCs.’
Adhip Ramesh, the company’s founder, says TrustCheckr is “an insurance these banks and NBFCs can enter into,” letting them discover frauds as early as onboarding and saving them a great deal of time and money in the process.
More than seven clients, including Snapmint and Bajaj Allianz, have now done more than 10 million TrustChecks with TrustCheckr. More than 50 clients are currently in the startup’s pipeline.
Founded by Adhip and Shivraj Harsha in 2017 and led by IIFL Securities, TrustCheckr recently raised INR 6 Cr in a Pre-Series A funding round. Rangsons (NR Group), an existing investor, also took part in the round.
As a result of the new funding, Adhip told us that TrustCheckr plans to expand its tech team and hire a few data scientists as well as more software engineers. He cited a lengthy product development roadmap for this decision. TrustCheckr will use a portion of the money to expand its operations.
Since TrustCheckr’s beginnings, Adhip and Shivraj have shared their thoughts on what they’ve been up to, what technologies they have developed, and how the digital payments environment in India will change in the future with us today!.
TrustCheckr Makes an Appearance
Adhip and Shivraj are shooting for the stars with their brand-new start-up.
Since banks and NBFCs may use TrustCheckr’s solutions to detect fraud throughout the onboarding process, Adhip said, “We truly want to be on every single bank [and] NBFC.” Adhip added that this will allow his company to assist financial institutions in detecting traditional forms of fraud.
That’s why TrustCheckr is “like an insurance any fintech can actually get into, and block all the ongoing scams that are happening [and] which will be happening on their platforms.”
It is critical for both TrustCheckr and the banks and NBFCs that use their technologies to enter the market at an early stage.
Not only does this minimize the workload of recovery teams, which are no longer required to hunt for bogus accounts, but banks and NBFCs can also lower the number of non-performing accounts (NPAs) by using TrustCheckr.
As a result, every time a new account is opened, the financial institution with which the account is opened instantly incurs a financial burden, whether it is for credit underwriting or issuing the credit itself. To help these companies avoid this, TrustCheckr has made a strong case.
Adding to Adhip’s point, he explained how financial inclusion has a direct impact on GDP, as individuals are coming online with more money to spend, and this, in turn, pulls up more and more scammers.
As a result, the startup’s goal is to get in early in the process of onboarding and to clip the wings of these fraudsters in the rapidly expanding digital economy of India.
Shivraj told us, “essentially, we aim to be a de facto fraud prevention tool in India. The startup’s initial goal, according to him, is to achieve scale by collaborating with two to three large clients.
A Series A fundraising round of $8-10 million is also being discussed by TrustCheckr with well-known investors to help the company achieve the rapid growth it requires over the next 12 to 15 months.
Creating Digital Personas
Because of this, they took care to clarify what TrustCheckr does to guard against such scams.
According to Shivraj, the current framework that all firms are employing is mostly bureau-centric. However, the AADHAR-centric framework is also in place to verify a person’s digital identity.
It was then that Shivraj explained how NBFCs go about verifying the identification of a person by using their mobile number and email address. While the system is not immune to basic fraud, he claims that two-factor authentication may be easily circumvented.
“Also, two-factor authentication may be on your mind. The question is, “How does that matter?” If a person wants to, they can submit their own KYC documents while submitting the contact information of a nonexistent person, Shivraj explained.
Despite the fact that the email and phone numbers don’t belong to the person they claim to be, “what occurs in a company’s system is that this is a genuine customer, a genuine verified customer that you have onboarded,” he said.
According to the co-founder, it is too late for companies to recover when the first calls for recovery fail.
Awakening to the fact that their initial line of defense or means of communication has been breached, Shivraj explained. The firm has developed a series of solutions to avoid this.
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Itemized Catalog
Four API solutions are presently available from TrustCheckr, allowing it to identify and preempt fraud from numerous inlets.
APIs for assessing phone, email, IP, and device risk are all available. First and foremost, the first two may be used immediately, while the latter two are in the works and will be ready to plugin soon.
A bank or NBFC’s platform may easily be plugged into these APIs, allowing them to detect fraud from all four primary visual identity bases in the digital world, according to Adhip and Shivraj.
Digital identity security is critical for the success of any digital payments infrastructure, Adhip stated, noting that fresh APIs are being added to enable them to regulate fraud at a 360-degree level.
The business is also developing an alert system for banks and other financial institutions. There are TrustCheckr Alerts in place that will warn the banks and NBFCs that are working with the startup about any questionable behavior that they discover during the onboarding process.
In a nutshell, the startup’s goal is to help banks and non-bank financial institutions (NBFCs) avoid being scammed by ensuring that the people they are hiring are the proper ones.
Our favorite product was the Phone Risk Scoring Module, which assigns a 0–100 risk score to each phone number in a bank’s or NBFC’s database. The TrustCheckr website also shows that Adhip’s trust score is 84.15, which means that his phone number is on the list.
In the event that a visual identity’s TrustCheck score falls below 40, the bank/NBFC is alerted. Lenders should proceed cautiously with a score between 40 and 50 if the digital identity appears to be similar to fraudulent identities from historical data. A score of at least 50 is considered to be safe.
A dataset of around 1.5 million digital IDs is used by the startup. If you are a financial institution, you can use the Phone Risk API to give each digital identity in your database a TrustCheckr score, and also utilize the same via your application form to attach a score on future identities.
Adhip promises that you’ll know your TrustCheckr score in under two seconds.
The startup’s APIs, in essence, keep a record of the startup’s previous fraud data and use it to identify fraudulent activity during the onboarding process. For example, the startup’s APIs will notify the onboarding teams if someone who has previously defrauded someone attempts to do so once more.
Additional parameters such as region and carrier are also taken into consideration in order to identify fraudsters with a similar profile and alert onboarding teams at banks and non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs).
We are working with credit bureaus and financial institutions to make TrustCheckr the de-facto fraud prevention solution in India, which is what we are betting on right now!
Lending technology is the fastest-growing sub-sector in India’s finance market, and the business is gaining traction now. According to Inc42, the sub-sector will account for 47% ($616 Bn) of the $1.3 Tn total fintech market opportunity by 2025. The timing of TrustCheckr’s introduction into the market is certainly advantageous, but the company appears to be on the fast track to accomplishing its goals.
Source: INC42
