No dearth of funding for fundamentally strong companies, says Perfios CEO

Good companies never face issues raising money in India. What is the definition of a good company? An organisation which has strong fundamentals, steady growth, strong financials in terms of profitability or a clear path to profitability, investment in research and most importantly, a strong belief in their product. The product story has to be strong. One should not rush towards raising funds right after making one product and onboarding one client. One customer is not equal to a successful venture. One client is the first step to success – this serves as proof of the fact that somebody believes in your idea. When there are multiple clients buying the same product - then you can understand the product is a market fit. Eventually, when you plan to expand and scale, that is the time when you can look to source funds from outside.

With digital transformation, parallel to growth and progress, there are also quite a few challenges that arise, one of them being fraud. We are working on building fraud solutions, and have been investing in R&D specifically on this for more than 5 years, because we knew that the need would arise. We have rolled out a couple of products focussed on fraud prevention and mitigation, and have a few more in the pipeline for the next few years.

While we started our journey with personal finance management, we eventually pivoted to a B2B model with underwriting and due diligence, and today, we enable the end-to-end customer lifecycles for financial institutions across 18 geographies, including India and globally. Starting from sourcing, onboarding and due diligence, underwriting, servicing, collections, we enable complete decisioning journeys. Decisioning and analysis in the financial sector has also gone through many transformations. First, it went from physical to digital, and now we are seeing the magic of technology-led real-time analysis, which can enhance the quality of underwriting. That means the quality of income, quality of spending, everything, is being assessed in real time...We are also prioritising usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) in underwriting, where we have seen initial success. It is definitely showing positive results and is being appreciated by banks and financial institutions across India. We are investing heavily in this space, and will be coming out with more products soon...

We have 1,000 plus customers panning across India and globally including banks, insurers, NBFCs, fintechs, AMCs, e-commerce, among others. We are strengthening our global presence across all our current geographies, and will expand to newer markets in the coming years. We had our own share of learning when we started expanding about 5 years back. We saw an opportunity and entered the markers early, but it took us time to make our presence felt in each of the countries. Now, having established ourselves, we are focusing on increasing our market share in each of the geographies. We are parallelly exploring opportunities of expanding in western geographies as well.

IPO is not something that we chase. It’s a journey and not the end goal we are fixated upon. Whether in preparation for a potential IPO, or in the absence of an immediate filing, we are committed to focusing on operational excellence with strong systems and processes, and we continue to prioritise financial health and governance structures to meet the rigorous standards expected of public companies. Once we are ready, we’ll hit the market, however, the timeline is difficult to pinpoint.