Getting Banks Ready For Fintech Revolution Zeta's product offerings not only helps banks to gate faster, agile and more efficient in their product launches but also enables them to participate in the fintech and open banking revolution by making them embeddable banking ready
By Shipra Singh
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Bhavin Turakhia and Ramki Gaddipati were keen to build a platform that would enable banks to offer a truly state-of-the-art experience to its customers, which can also be deployed rapidly by banks. One key frustration, as per Turakhia, that initiated this conversation between the duo, who are former colleagues from Directi, in 2014 was their sour experience around payments with banks.
With this problem statement started Zeta's journey. "Along the way we discovered that a large part of the problem is that there are so many vendors offering different and disconnected solutions that it's almost impossible for a bank to work with all of them in unison to create new experiences for its customers," said CEO and co-founder Turakhia.
Founded in 2015, Zeta provides tech infrastructure to banks and financial technology companies. As Turakhia described his company, Zeta has built from scratch the modern banking stack that allows banking products ranging from credit cards, loans, including buy-now-pay-later, and retail banking to run entirely on its platform.
"It (Zeta) is fully developed from the ground up and is cloud native, with 100 per cent API coverage." Turakhia is quick to clarify that Zeta is a banking tech and SaaS company that builds technology solutions for banks and fintech companies but would not classify themselves under either of those two categories.
Building Banking Solutions
Zeta's product offerings not only helps banks to gate faster, agile and more efficient in their product launches but also enables them to participate in the fintech and open banking revolution by making them embeddable banking ready.
The company is achieving this through its two white-label product offerings: Zeta Tachyon Suite and Zeta Fusion for banks and fintech companies, respectively. The former is a suite of features comprising core banking, credit and debit processing, prepaid hosting and loans, all of which is integrated in a mobile app that enables banks to provide a neobank experience and sell more loans to and reduce frauds for its customers.
Zeta Fusion, on the other hand, is an embeddable banking platform that empowers banks to provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) to fintech companies, neobank startups and distributors, who use them to embed prepaid, credit, debit and loan products within their apps and experiences.
The San Francisco-headquartered company has a strong global business presence in eight countries across India, Asia and Latin America. It serves over 10 banks, including the likes of HDFC bank, Standard Chartered Bank, RBL Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank and 25 fintech companies and claims to have powered over 10 million cards.
Journey to the Unicorn Club
Zeta entered the coveted club of unicorns--startups valued $1 billion and above-- in May this year after raising $250 million from Softbank Vision Fund 2. The funding round valued the startup at $1.45 billion.
What's interesting about the startup's journey to the fast growing list of unicorns is that the company's first ever institutional round knocked off its valuation over $1 billion. Typically, Indian startups take 2-4 institutional funding rounds to cross the unicorn milestone.
Zeta had raised its first external funding from Sodexo, an employee benefits and rewards company, in 2019 at a valuation of $300 million. The funding amount is estimated to be around $60 million, as per Crunchbase.
The company plans to utilize the proceeds of the latest funding round to accelerate its growth in the US, Europe and Asia, which includes scaling its operations, team, and platform to meet the demands of its expanding customer base. The company also plans to expand its current workforce of 750 employees by hiring sales and business development team members across the US and Europe.
On being asked about the company's growth plans for the next two years, Turakhia said they are excited about what lies ahead. "We continue to expand in many ways. We are ramping up our investments in our product and technology portfolio. We are building go-to-market teams in most of the large markets globally with special emphasis on the US and North America. Europe and the Middle East are also focus areas in the coming year."
