Regtech ( Regulatory Technology), often described as the younger brother of fintech, is finding its niche market in India. Obviously, with the familiar and popular challenge – the abundance of unorganized statutory and compliance data for KYC profiling.

Frost & Sullivan recommends the global Regtech market would reach $6.45 billion by 2020, and another survey indicates that by 2023, it can reach 412.3 billion. Provided the significance of this niche in banking and finance in the mercurial regulations, comes Delhi startup Verismart, which makes use of blockchain technology to administer various points for multiple industries across verticals.

With the interruption in digital transactions moving at a rapid speed, the amount of data that is to be regulated and organized is also increasing with the risks of identity theft and cybercrime.

Regulatory technology must deliver its goods, specifically in a high-risk financial market that is as charismatic as in India. As per the information received by ‘Tracxn,’ investments in Regtech in India have expanded five times at $43.5 million in 2019 so far, as regards to $7.26 million last year.

The New Delhi-based ‘Verismart’ is a similar blockchain platform that automates the know your customer, business profiling of customers, risk, based on the intelligence of various organizations across industries like the sharing economy, banking, and telecom. “While the placement of information is often shared, fragmented, and in unclear territories, one way to bring order to end-authentication of identities is decentralization,” says Co-founder of Verismart, Saurabh Gupta.

Verismart was founded by Piyush Gupta and Saurabh Gupta, who came in contact through a familiar friend. Saurabh is a B.Tech from Delhi. Formerly, he co-founded and successfully ran Getmeashop.com from 2012 to 2014. With more than 800 shops created, the startup was accomplished by the ‘Times Internet Group’ in the year 2015.

Between 2010-2015, Saurabh and 28-year-old Piyush co-founded the New Delhi-based Metawing, a fintech product that was sold to a private equity fund. Piyush worked with ‘Byju’s’ earlier and finished B.Tech from Delhi College of Engineering. Saurabh says, “The addressable target audience is initially the underbanked segment of society. There are around 950 million underbanked people in Asia.

We want to furnish our product to this demography as part of our financial inclusion strategy,”. They started Verismart to regulate themselves with the vision for smart cities in the country and the capabilities of the consumer-enterprise interaction.

A changing Regtech climate With the increasing cost of risk management and compliance, technology, and analytics help the finance sector be better equipped to handle regulations.

Regtech plays a considerable role in enabling this. Verismart takes cognizance of rules in the financial markets. Founded in February 2016, the team consisting of 19 members is now busy building its visual analytics platform, which primarily deals with privacy compliance, alternative data sharing as zero-knowledge proof for risk mitigation, fraud management, product personalization, re-identification.

This product has varied use cases in auto refinancing and identity access management across organizations, alternative data for product segmentation, risk and business profiling, and personalization, pre-assessed financial and digital health cognitive score, fraud detection in KYC processes, smart contracts, and automation in privacy compliance.

It also automates privacy compliances, which could consist of 800 datasets or more, depending on shared information in the form of smart contracts, to make it easily shareable. It Claims to have more than 50 paying customers; this blockchain startup earns revenue from the ‘pay-per-transaction model,’ where users pay for per-API and cognitive profiling.

Verismart now works in association with institutions like ICICI, Bank of Fujairah, Axis Bank, ADIB, Standard Chartered, Visa, Amazon Pay, Vodafone, Kotak Bank, Paytm, Healthnme, Delhi Police, Airtel payment bank, etc. Saurabh says, “The startup has clients in the telecom industry and more than 15 NBFCs.”,

The funding story The startup raised a pre-seed round and a seed round so far (undisclosed), from Smart Dubai government, Startup Bootcamp (SBC), Global Scaling Academy, and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn.

Having claimed to have on-boarded over 11 million profiles on its blockchain to offer multiple banking products with auto refinancing, Verismart envisions to clock 600 million profiles by 2021. Startups like Simility, Digio, DotAI, NextKYC, Credible Ninja, and Signzy, among others, are primarily Regtech players. Globally, prominent players include Secure key and Palo Alto-based identity verification startup Jumio, which also has its offices in Jaipur and Bengaluru.