Today, more than ever, technology has the power to transform background screening in India. Companies like AuthBridge are leveraging technology to offer better screening solutions to their customers and provide seamless onboarding experiences. In a panel interview at the BW Business World TechTors 2022, Sandeep Singh, SVP, Product, AuthBridge sheds light on the importance of India specific tech solutions and how swiftly we are moving in that direction. Let’s read a few interesting excerpts from this interview shared below:
Q1. How do you leverage technology to offer better solutions to customers and how tech has evolved?
Technology is an enabler, and to leverage technology it is important to have a deep customer connection. Understanding the customer pain points is a must and then using technology to offer the right solution. That’s what we do at AuthBridge! We help build platforms for background verification wherever there’s a trust issue between two parties at the time of hiring a vendor or a candidate. We leverage ML, OCR, and various other technologies to help. We use big data platforms to find out if we can work/partner with a particular company or not. The core idea is to find data around education, employment, criminal history, etc. Earlier this was done using manual processes and now it’s all digital.
Q2. How is technology playing a key role to enable/augment business growth for start-ups/ big scale industries?
Technology is certainly helping start-ups scale. Today, the entire internet has changed with the help of democratisation of technology where anyone can start something of their own. For AuthBridge, we had been solving problems using manual operations, but there were errors. But now using tech, we’ve cleaned this up and do it far more efficiently. Our TAT of 30 days has significantly reduced to 2 days. Technology has solved our customer problem faster and better. There’s an established method to solve a problem using great ideas, theory, which is 3x, 5x better but using technology, the solution becomes 10x better.
Q3. There’s an old adage which says disruption starts with introspection. How true is this statement in your career trajectory or from your company lens?
Having deep introspection is the key. But my observation says that having an agile mindset, a deep customer connection (customer problem) and being ready to change are the real disruptors.
One must be ready to disrupt themselves or be flexible with the changing conditions, leading to good IBITA and revenues. It’s important to have the courage to adopt and change business practices. That is the real introspection.
Q4. We talk of disruptions, innovations, technologies in the Indian content, what are your observations when talking of these things when juxtaposed with the global landscape.
Indian innovation has just begun, in the last decade. Our true innovation majorly lies in the Indian context. What starts globally is an enabler, but the question to ask is does it solve India specific problems? No. Indian problems are large and complex to solve, connecting companies and ecosystems is the key. Once you crack that model you just scale through. We need more India specific innovations and only using the best technology can help. Many new age founders will turn into profitable unicorns by serving the Indian market. Infact, I’m sure 10 years from now, our models will be used outside to scale at ease and speed.
Q 5. What are some of the trends that you anticipate in the next 2 years and how do you see business as technology as a business necessity? how do you think everything will pan out?
AuthBridge is a company that helps solve trust issues when two parties are doing a transaction. Where someone is hiring one party, or hiring a vendor, or signing on to a platform to play a game, there is a trust issue. As digitisation increases and if ever we go into the metaverse era, the possibilities of fraud will increase. That is where we see a lot of opportunities coming up for companies like AuthBridge to grow, connect and solve trust issues. A lot of India specific use cases are now out there to draw inspiration.
Closing Comments
Technology will remain the enabler always. Finding those India specific pain points, understanding them well and then figuring out how we can solve them is the bottom line, rather than copying models. We can create a billion-dollar business in a country like India if we devise ways to scale growth. What you need is a very specific solution to problems, which is what every tech entrepreneur looks forward to.
