The following interview is a conversation we had with Ankit Ratan, Co-Founder and CEO of Signzy, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $38 Million Raised to Build the Future of Digital Onboarding Infrastructure
Ankit Ratan
Hey, Brett, awesome to talk to you today. Yeah, looking forward to have a great conversation.
Brett
Super excited to chat with you. So, to kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Ankit Ratan
Yeah. So maybe let me just start directly from college. I did my engineering from IIT india and moved to a company in us called Essex League, where I worked for two years, largely in financial services. The top two clients I worked at were MetLife and city. And there were a lot of, you can say, learning moments for me, fundamentally moments that changed my thinking of life. And I think top of that was that enterprises are these inefficient beasts. I guess we will talk more about it during the rest of the conversation, so I’ll not spend too much time there. But one thing led to another. Four of us felt we can start a company ourselves, catering to enterprises. So I jumped into my first startup, which was called Crosslink. What we tried to do was do data analytics for enterprises.
Ankit Ratan
It was going well in the sense it was financially a good company. It was solving problem, having customers, but it was turning out to be a services business. And to be frank, I was too young to do a services business. I didn’t have my heart in it. And in 2015, I was in the middle of thinking about whether to continue with this or quit it. And on the side, actually, I interestingly was doing a coursera course on entrepreneurship. And as a case study, the company that we created was called sciencey. And somehow I kept building greater and greater conviction on that. My other Co-Founder, Arpit, who is a lawyer, he joined us, then our CTO. He dropped out of college and joined us. And by 2016, we had at least the founding team full time working on this.
Ankit Ratan
And then when went out to the market, we kind of realized that there were a lot of learnings that were having, and slowly, slowly we kept building. And over the last seven years, we have been able to position ourselves as a company that solves for banking infrastructure. I’m sure there would be questions where we’ll go more deeply into it, but for me personally, I think it has been a journey of finding a large area like enterprises, where I felt there’s a lot of inefficiency, and then through both of my startups, finding ways to solve practical problems, to solve real problems. And I always like to use the example that somebody has to take on the dirty work and solve it. Everything can’t be cool and sexy. So I love those kind of problems. And I guess science is also one of those companies.
Brett
Well, let’s dive deeper into science. So just at a very high level, and I think you hinted at there, but maybe you can just go a bit deeper. How do you articulate the problem that science solves? And let’s talk a little bit about the solution and how you solve that problem.
Ankit Ratan
Yeah. So what is happening in banking is that they are probably undergoing once in a lifetime change, which probably was only seen in the last millennium. And the digitization is happening on two fronts. One is that banks themselves are undergoing automation of processes, and the second is that banks now have to distribute their products not only through their branches, but through partners such as Google or some ecosystem player where their customers want credit cards, et cetera. And the old way of banking has always been branch led, sales rep led, banking, relationship manager led banking. And this fundamental transformation is a little bit challenging for them.
Ankit Ratan
And where sciencey comes in is that we allow them to make this transition without spending millions of dollars in expensive software from large vendors, without spending six to twelve months trying to integrate different providers in fintech, infra and workflow. Science is a single stack where you can find fintech APIs, starting from identity underwriting, contract signing, et cetera, in one place, and a workflow to stitch them together to build customer journeys. And therefore you’re able to substantially reduce your cost, because everything is one place and there’s one single license, and you are also able to get live very quickly using our no code workflow builder. So, yeah, in a summary, that is what we kind of solve for in macking, and the value that we add is directly measurable in terms of time we save.
Ankit Ratan
And then of course, once the application is live, customers see faster tats, application onboardings increase, cost of completing an application decreases in terms of operational cost. So the software then starts paying for itself in some ways.
Brett
What’s it like selling to banks and financial institutions? How do they generally feel about making new technology buys?
Ankit Ratan
I think that would have been a very relevant question in some ways, maybe two years back before COVID I guess today it has become in some ways an essential factor that they cannot ignore. And they are no longer asking this question of should we do it or should we not do it? The question has definitely moved to how should we do it? And I think it is a golden moment in some ways for b, two b founders working in the BFSI industry where they are not facing this wall, because even my first startup was in banking and I can clearly see the difference. You don’t have to convince them that there would be consumers coming digitally who would not want to come to your branch. That convincing doesn’t need to be done.
Ankit Ratan
They are convinced that there would be substantial digital business that will come to these banks, and they truly want to find out the best vendor or the best way to go through that process.
Brett
And internally, as they ask that question to themselves, are they thinking, as they explore going digital, are they thinking, do we just build this in house? Is that an active conversation that they’re having and they’re just deciding between, do we do a vendor or do we do in house? Or do they not even try to do it in house?
Ankit Ratan
Yeah, I think the other thing that maybe will be good for audience to understand is when banks say in house, they truly mean some vendor that they have been working for a very long time and is a service company in some ways. And so in some ways, you’re never actually competing with the employees of the bank, but you’re competing with long standing embedded vendors in the bank. And yes, in house is always the first preference because those vendors are onboarded, they are trusted. There’s lot of relationship between the IT teams within the bank and those vendors. They have been through thick and thin. So when you come in, your value proposition has to be extremely differentiated and something that the current vendor cannot do. And it’s only then that you get a fair chance.
Ankit Ratan
Even after that, many times, you may still not get the deal.
Brett
What did you do to get that chance? Because looking through your website, I see logos like Citi, HSBC. Now these are obviously big banks, big institutions. What did you do to get that opportunity to work with them? And how did you build trust and credibility with these big companies early on?
Ankit Ratan
Yeah, I think the beauty about our product is that we kind of go and make unrealistic promise and we tell them that this complicated workflow that you think will take six months, you give us three days, we’ll sit out of your office, and we’ll make you go live in three days. Of course, it will not integrate with your system, so it will still be know app on a cloud for the moment, but we’ll show you how this will happen in three days in front of your eyes. And then when we deliver on that promise during the POC, it truly tells them that. I don’t like using the word magic, but it is a magical moment in some ways. And they definitely understand this is something their current vendor cannot do. They don’t have the capabilities to do it at all.
Ankit Ratan
So the chasm is too big. Like, you are no longer comparing yourself to an equivalent service or product. And I think from then on to your point about trust, you kind of meet your first promise, and then you’re honest enough to say that it will take time to integrate with your systems now, which is the probably harder part. My product works, but your systems are still legacy. There’s a lot of information security aspects you will ask me to do, et cetera, and that part will still take time. But now that I would demonstrate it that my no code platform can truly build in days and weeks and not months every time once I’m integrated, you have to make a change. It will take a week. It will not take a month or two months like it takes with your legacy vendors.
Ankit Ratan
And I think that approach has worked. They’ve seen that benefit, and hence they’ve slowly adopted us more and more.
Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about growth and adoption. Are there any metrics and numbers that you can share that highlight the growth and adoption that you’re seeing?
Ankit Ratan
Yeah, I think we do. Almost the number one metrics that we track is customer journeys on the platform, which means that across our banking partners and financial partners, how many customer journeys have happened? Today? We are doing almost 15 to 20 million journeys a month on our platform, which translates for us into a rough ARR of 15 million.
Brett
Wow.
Ankit Ratan
And we are looking to grow this year almost 100%. We have been growing for the last three years close to 100%. And I think the plan is to keep blending and expanding within these institutions, solving more and more problems for them.
Brett
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Ankit Ratan
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Now back today’s episode.
Brett
What countries are you in today?
Ankit Ratan
So we primarily operate in three geographies, which is us, Mena, which is Middle east, and India.
Brett
What’s it like when you move from one country to another? I’m guessing that every country has different regulations. Maybe in Europe it’s a little bit more portable, I think is what people have told me. But how do you country to country, when all the regulations are probably a little bit different?
Ankit Ratan
Yeah, I think India and us are two homogeneous countries. Large homogeneous countries. And probably while they both are different and regulation is different, but it is an easier problem. Europe actually, on the contrary, I think is far more complicated because every country would have some regulation which is slightly different, especially the financial services. And then there’s of course, language, which is also a barrier in some ways. So I think native english speaking population india and US, I think is much easier for the product and the teams to handle in some ways. And I think Middle east is a geography where we have tactically gone because somehow we got the right deals. And unlike, I think, b, two c in b, two b. I always like to say that everything is not some cool strategy.
Ankit Ratan
Sometimes you’ll get this large deal with some large bank and you’ll end up in that region. So I think Middle east was more of that.
Brett
What’s an average lifetime value of a consumer for a bank? And what’s the difference between the US and India, for example?
Ankit Ratan
So of course we would have extremely opportunistic and optimistic future values. But I would say among the current acvs, across our large top ten, the average ECV is something like seven hundred k. And at least today for us, India and us is not very different because we have the largest four banks india’s customers and large part of their businesses have adopted us. I think in us we still don’t have that kind of adoption in top five. So right now it’s not. But if I was to guess from my previous experiences, I think there would be a five x difference. Us would be five times more than India.
Brett
When it comes to your market category, I had introduced you as a digital onboarding infrastructure platform. I’d taken that from your website. Is that the market category or what is your market category today?
Ankit Ratan
What we solve for is that for banks, but our long term value proposition is that as banking is changing, there would be a category creation for AI led customer journeys. Because the transaction part of the banking is fine. It works. In this world, most transactions are subsecond transactions even today. What truly is not scaling is this myriad of human manual operations and every bank is creating their own journeys for account opening, for loan origination, for address changes, for Recyc. And they are not very different actually, apart from the branding and stuff. And we feel this is a category in itself. And science is planning to be a category leader in AI led customer journeys for banking.
Brett
What types of activities are you doing now? Or do you plan to do in the future to evangelize that category and educate the market so that they understand that they need a category like this right now?
Ankit Ratan
That’s a great question. And right now I think most of it is content. The probably right way to do it is actually talk a little more about it like we are doing right now. And we have been only more bolder about it in last two years as founders. Sometimes even you may have that vision, but you would not say it out loud unless you have some evidence of it. So I think we just started saying out loud recently, and I guess we just need to keep increasing that pitch. And the second thing that we are also trying to do is during events, rather than focusing on the product, focus on this transition, and rather than getting banks to talk about our technicalities of the product, talk about what they need to do in their entire journey.
Ankit Ratan
And I think in some ways events are working more for us than anything else because most of these bit size banks and small size banks do not have as much time on digital content, et cetera. But they have a lot of time at events and that is where we plan to kind of take this message.
Brett
How have you seen your messaging and positioning evolve over the last couple of years?
Ankit Ratan
Yeah, I think when we started off, were trying to solve risk and compliance in banking and when we started going deeper, we realized that there are basically two categories in risk and compliance. One is what you can call customer journey, risk and compliance. Customers are opening accounts, taking loans, changing addresses, et cetera. And the other is transactional, part of risk and compliance, that I am transferring a large amount of money and somebody needs to either look at the transaction, ask for evidence or report it as suspicious transaction. And we realized that the first part of banking in risk and compliance, which was customer journeys, there is of course a pain at the bank side, that they have a lot of operational cost. Still fraud and et cetera. And there was a huge pain at the customer side. They hate these processes.
Ankit Ratan
And somehow fintechs were innovating at that edge and beating banks in acquiring customers. And we realized that this is a great opportunity where the banks lack the tech edge. They want a compliant, secure solution, and at the same time they want things to be friendly like fintechs. And we felt this was a great opportunity for us. And that is what we kind of focused on and honed on.
Brett
I read on your LinkedIn, I think was your slogan there. It was banking customer acquisition 3.0. Can you just take us through that? How would you define 1.02.0? And then I think 3.0 is clear, but can you just take us back? How do you define 1.0 and 2.0?
Ankit Ratan
Yeah, I think 1.0 is those paper forms. You reach a branch or a relationship manager reaches you and everyone is working on paper forms. That’s more like 1.02.0 is, I think, what we just saw, right. Banks became digitized in the sense that they had databases, so they had web applications, sales reps had mobile apps. But you are still filling 50 form fields and submitting a lot of documents. And those fields and documents were going to operations. Operations was taking two, three days to still validate that stuff and give decisions back to you. 3.0 is where you have to give very less data because most of that gets pulled from some source or your documents are autored by AI. You get a decision on your application within seconds, because rather than a manual operation, everything is now done by AI in terms of taking decisions.
Ankit Ratan
So 3.0 is an experience which is an AI led first experience, and which brings everything to Netflix or Amazon like experience in banking.
Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over $38 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Ankit Ratan
Yeah, I mean, even though I have raised 38 million, but I’m not sure if I have learned something uniquely. One thing I’ve definitely learned is that investors do not care so much about what your product is, and what they truly care about is what your product can do for a certain customer base. And founders, especially at early stages, many times focus too much on their product. They believe they’ve built something great and innovative, and they want to share that innovation with investors as well. But investors don’t care about that innovation as much as they care about what that innovation can do for a certain customer base, which founders tend to focus less on. So that has been maybe, in summary, the most important learning and if some audience can take that and focus on that, I think it will help them for sure.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What is that big picture vision? What’s the company going to look like?
Ankit Ratan
Yeah, as I said earlier in the interview, we believe this is a new category in itself, like CRM, like core banking and current solutions are subpar. People are using 2.0 workflow builders to solve some of these problems. Sometimes it’s custom technology, et cetera, and there’s clearly a common thread across the sector, and so therefore it should have a category of its own. We believe because of our very deep engineering we have done in financial services, integrating so many fintech partners, in building so many widgets and workflows, we are ahead of the curve, ahead of competition in some ways, and we hope to see ourselves as a category leader, helping banks who cannot spend millions of dollars on it technology become competitive to their fintech peers, even to their large banking peers, by using sciency as their core customer journey platform.
Brett
Amazing. I love the approach you’re taking. I love the vision, and I really love the problem that you’re tackling here. Now, we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap before we do. If any founders listening in want to follow on with your journey as you build on this vision, where should they go?
Ankit Ratan
LinkedIn? Twitter? I don’t get so many dms on Twitter, so I think Twitter may be the best one. LinkedIn is a bit noisy.
Brett
Yeah, I think everyone can relate. The LinkedIn’s full of outdown there.
Ankit Ratan
Awesome.
Brett
Well, thank you so much again for taking the time. This is a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it and really appreciate you taking the time.
Ankit Ratan
Same here, Britt. Thank you so much.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Brett
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