A product-based company catering data insights & risk analytics, Crediwatch was breathed life into by a group of 50 specialists and experts in machine learning, business decision support, contextual information intelligence and amplified intelligence. Headquartered in Bengaluru, Crediwatch offers innovative technology each day and strives to deliver transparent insights and accurate results. The firm pulls out valuable insights by administering artificial intelligence & deep learning and conveys the same to decision makers. Meghna Suryakumar further highlights Crediwatch’s experience and the growth through changing market dynamics.

In conversation with Meghna Suryakumar, Founder & CEO, Crediwatch

What inspired the founders to venture into such a unique domain of IT services sector? Kindly narrate the inception story. Was it backed by any mentors and investors in the initial stages?
India has 50 million plus unregistered businesses and 1.13 million active registered companies but a mere 7000 of these are listed offering detailed disclosure while the rest exist in the realm of Information ‘Dark Space’. There is an estimated 1000 billion annual business entered with these ‘dark space’ companies as a combination of credit, trading and other agency related activities. Business with these companies results in revenue leakages of 50 to 100bn annually due to challenges of identifying the right client/

lead, tracking these clients, associated risks of bad debts and fraud. When the Indian government started to encourage transparency amongst businesses and digitized several government data sources as a part of their open data movement commitment, Crediwatch’s founders- Meghna and Sandeep, identified it as a key opportunity to address the challenge.

Sandeep Anandampillai is a techno-cart and has a vast experience in building technology solutions from his experience at Oracle and Thought Works. I am a lawyer by profession and understood the need to put the right framework in place, in order to bring this information to the market. Together, we started Crediwatch, a data-insights-as-a-service platform, allowing banking and financial institutions to access information and benefit from insights about businesses and entities in India.

What is the nature of the company’s client base? Share one of the successful implementations of your services with your clients that can be highlighted in the profile.
Our major clients are financial institutions including PSU/private banks and NBFCs. Our solutions are also used by legal firms and corporates for their due diligence processes. We have successfully implemented our flagship ‘Early Warning System’ with a large private sector bank and one of the leading NBFCs in India. In addition, a large public sector bank in the country has been utilizing our enhanced credit reports for over 18 months to underwrite loans in their credit review department.

The IT industry comes with its own set of unique challenges. Mention some of the hurdles Crediwatch had to overcome. What innovations did it adopt or is adopting to overcome the challenges?
When Fintech companies in India were trying to solve the financing gap by lending themselves, Crediwatch went against the trend and became focussed on creating a digital data ecosystem. We were able to win the confidence of large financial institutions by gaining their trust through limited live experiments and testing the results prior to large scale adoption. Our focus on quality risk and business insights using a proprietary AI based predictive engine helped us differentiate ourselves as a leading analytics player.

What is the road map that has been envisioned by Crediwatch for its future?
In the short term, we will continue to focus on enhancing our offerings to the SME segment. Along with this, we intend to spearhead the mainstream use of alternate data points, new age risk evaluation methodologies and significantly beef up our ML driven evaluation and monitoring systems. With more digital footprint being created by businesses, we intend to be geared up as a business to harness those. In the long run, we look to build on our insights driven platform and intend to nurture an ecosystem that enables various stakeholders.