We are now looking forward to enter into different countries: Siddharth Kukatlapalli, Synitzen

Synitzen, incorporated in 2014 in Hyderabad, offers digital identity solutions as a service. The tech company provides an instant, paperless, electronic and authentic customer onboarding solution for varied industries. Founded by Dinesh Reddy, Vamsi Kotte and Siddharth Kukatlapalli, Syntizen has about 50-60 employees. The company has received funding from Mastercard International and Access Computech Private Limited in the Pre-Series A round. Siddharth Kukatlapalli, co-founder and CBO, Syntizen recently spoke to Dataquest about the company’s future plans.

DQ: When and how did you come up with the idea to start Syntizen? 

Siddharth Kukatlapalli: Syntizen was started in 2014, a year after our graduations. All the three co-founders graduated in 2013. The idea of Digital Identity was in our minds during our engineering days and Fingerprint matching was one of the projects taken up by us in Engineering. The initial idea was to reach out to banks but later we realised the potential of the product and identified that our system can be used in any industry where there is a need for the business to identify customers. The funding from Mastercard International helped us to further believe in our idea and expand the services to other domains apart from BFSI, especially governments. We are now looking forward to enter into different countries where we feel these services can be easily adopted.

DQ: Who is your target audience? And how do you plan to reach them? 

Siddharth Kukatlapalli: Our target audience currently is the BFSI Sector and Governments. We are having a positive word of mouth currently as we are working with about 25+ companies in the BFSI domain and 5 state governments. We are in the process of reaching out to BFSI clients through various marketing channels (Social Media, Fintech Events, etc).

DQ: What are some of the challenges that you have faced so far? How did you overcome them? 

Siddharth Kukatlapalli: Business Process oriented: Since KYC is a process that is mandated by regulatory bodies, the approvals from these regulatory authorities to use Electronic ways to perform KYC was an initial hurdle. Once the approval was given by almost all regulators, it became easier for us to push the digital solutions.

Resources for Developing Digital Identity solutions: Initially the concept of Digital Identity, Fingerprint matching, etc was pretty new to the Indian Market. Since we were one of the first movers in this domain, we had the initial problem of finding the right technical resources capable of building these solutions. We had to update ourselves and ensure that we built a state-of-the-art team having the right experience in Digital Identity.

DQ: How will Syntizen help NBFCs in their authorisation process?

Siddharth Kukatlapalli: Syntizen has a variety of Digital Identity solutions like Aadhaar e-KYC, Video KYC, e-Sign, Facial matching & liveness detection etc which shall help NBFC's to ease the. Customer On-boarding process. As per PMLA, any NBFC's has to get the KYC of a customer before offering them any kind of service and our solutions allow them to perform this KYC task with ease. It is to be noted that our system helps save a lot of cost and time for NBFC's in identifying the customer. Our Customer Identification solution is available as a product called as Electronic Customer On-boarding System (e-COS). We may also give the services as modules if there is a requirement for the client.