Even as india’s fintech story has gathered pace, Perfios Software Solutions has slowly cemented its place as a leading Software-as-a-Service provider to the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector. In 2021, the Bengaluru-based firm effected a major reshuffle of its leadership to prepare for an IPO in two to three years. The restructuring saw Sabyasachi Goswami, then CBO, succeed Co-founder V.R. Govindarajan as CEO, while the latter became Executive Chairman. “When you are getting the company ready for a longer run, you need a lot younger people; that was Govindarajan’s thinking,” says Goswami.
This future-oriented approach has helped Perfios win the Best Fintech in Value Added Services award in the BT–KPMG Best Banks and Fintechs Survey 2021-22. Started as a B2C firm in 2008, Perfios pivoted to B2B as it realised that financial firms needed innovative tech to execute deep data analytics in an efficient manner post the 2008 recession. It then built a product—that helps BFSI firms lower credit costs and non-performing assets—by enabling better understanding and management of disparate data sets. “Perfios helps lenders with seamless on-boarding and digitisation of manual data to provide analytical and hyper personalised solutions,” says the CEO.
The firm has since forayed into insurance, where its Fraud, Waste and Abuse solution helps automate the manual-intensive fraud investigation process. Goswami says its objective is to build customer lifecycle management solutions covering the entire BFSI space. The company—profitable for the past five years—clocked $17.5 million in revenues in FY22. Goswami says it is also looking at inorganic growth opportunities. While it has raised $126.1 million so far, Goswami says the firm is open to raising future rounds for acquisitions.
To innovate, Perfios has a separately funded innovation council, where management devotes dedicated time. The CEO says the road to its IPO over the next two to three years will be used to put the fundamentals in the right place in addition to establishing the right set of stakeholders. “We are getting IPO-ready, which won’t be before two to three years because that much time is required to a build stronger moat and growth drivers. We don’t want a failure story,” he says.
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