India, February 20: India-based Banking-as-a-service platform Decentro, a market-leading banking & payments platform, has set its foot in the Asia Pacific region with the commencement of the Singapore operations. Kickstarting their operations in the heart of Singapore’s commercial centre with office space in Robinson Road, Decentro is applying for a payments licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) via its new entity.
The company has also brought Saksham Shubham, a former Grab senior member, and WingPay Chief Business Officer, as Business Head for South East Asia to drive the business operations in the Asia Pacific region. With over 10 years of experience centred around building brands and businesses from scratch, Saksham has a penchant for understanding businesses, scaling them, and building operationally profitable models.
Talking about the expansion, Rohit Taneja, CEO & Co-Founder of Decentro, “We are thrilled to be entering a country that has a fairly evolving and responsive ecosystem of fintech companies. The growing synergy between India and Singapore on digital payments and their public infrastructure offers us an opportunity to take forward our experience and expertise in simplifying payments in India to a dynamic economy like Singapore.”
“In the previous 5 years, India has emerged as a leader in digital payments infrastructure such as Unified Payments Interface (UPI), and now other countries are looking to partner with Indian companies to yield similar results for them. This brings a big opportunity for platforms like us to strive to provide the best financial platform for new-age companies to build at 10X the speed,” Taneja added.
Having empowered over 300+ companies across various commerce and fintech domains such as Consumer Platforms, Non-Banking Financial Firms (NBFCs), Loan Service Providers (LSPs), Prepaid Issuers (PPIs), Neobanks, Wealth Managers and Personal Finance apps, and more in India, Decentro is now looking to simplify payment & banking flows for companies incepted or willing to expand in Singapore.
Speaking of the opportunities in the region, Saksham Shubham, Business Head – SEA, says,“We see massive growth opportunities between India and South East Asia. Our central banks and regulators have been learning from each other and working together closely for the past couple of years. Looking at UPI-based payments this year within Singapore will be revolutionary, and we expect this to bolster micro-payments in the domestic payments space. More importantly, our learnings from a hyper-competitive country like India will help us provide a much stronger API-based infrastructure for companies in this region.”
“We have received overwhelming responses from companies in Singapore who want a seasoned domestic operator with prior experience with a large country like India. Mainly due to our 10X better API stack and experience in processing huge volumes. ” Saksham added.
The platform has registered exponential growth, clocking an average of 120 million annualized API transactions across 2022. Additionally, as a company, Decentro has grown by more than 35x since its seed round in October 2020, with its valuation growing 3.3x. The firm has also recently closed its Series A funding round of $4.7 million from marquee investors such as Rapyd Ventures, Leonis VC from Europe, and Uncorrelated Ventures based out of California, US.
