NayaOne - Simplifying Access to Financial Services on Any Hardware

Tony [00:00:04] Welcome to Code Together, a podcast for developers by developers, where we discuss technology and trends in industry.  

Tony [00:00:11] I'm your host Tony Mongkolsmai.  

Tony [00:00:17] In previous podcasts, I mentioned that this year we will be highlighting several startups who are part of the oneAPI for Startups program. Today we are joined by Karan Jain, founder and CEO of NayaOne. Karan was previously head of technology for the Westpac Group and founded their Innovation and R&D group, Lab 23. He also served on the board of the UK Finance, Digital Technology and Cyber Products and Services Group. Welcome to the podcast, Karan.  

Karan [00:00:41] Thanks, Tony. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.  

Tony [00:00:44] So normally we actually talk to a lot of people in the science and simulation domain and sometimes in the rendering domain, but this time we're talking to Karan, CEO of NayaOne, which is actually in a completely different space. It's in the financial space. So, Karan, can you tell us a little bit about NayaOne and where it sits in the financial ecosystem?  

Karan [00:01:03] Yeah, absolutely. NayaOne, our core purpose is to bring financial services institutions, your banks, insurance companies, asset managers together with the fintech ecosystem. And I use the word fintech loosely. So that is basically your fintechs, reg techs insure techs. Anybody who works, who works in tech space within the financial service industry. We found or when in my previous jobs trying to work with fintechs was highly painful because it takes 6 to 9 months to onboard them. And it's like, okay, well that's not good for the bank or the insurance company that I used to work for, because by the time you roll something out, you spend nine months of your runway just trying to figure out how are you going to work with and to conduct the proof of concept and you just have to go with them. And it's not good from a fintechs point of view because they're spending nine months for a decision to whether the bank or the insurance company's going to go ahead with it. It's like it was like 2020. It's like there's got to be a better way of working. So it's like, okay, well, why don't we just do the proof of concept without you having to onboard me? Right. It's like a fundamental shift in how the industry works. So we're not a particular product, we're a platform. We aggregate the fintechs that banks and insurance companies are interested in into our platform. We provide synthetic data because that's the next challenge. No one could get access to their own data. So we do synthetic data, public data, and we offer a secure environment. So, you know, it might be a Jupyter environment or a VS Code or any particular software development tool that the organization's interest, we'll bring it in. And we hosted. So to us, that's what we do.  

Tony [00:02:43] So as a marketplace, then that means that you have people coming to you with their applications to provide that to the the people who would be interested in using it as a service. So whether it's the insurance company or the bank, somebody comes to you and says, I have a piece of software that I think somebody might want to use. And then you said you provide the secure front end for people to try the service before they buy it. Are there certain requirements that you have of applications who have to come in to your marketplace? How does that work? Is it just like Jupyter notebook or what's the authentication look like?  

Karan [00:03:15] Yeah, authentication is real. You know, first basics first. First thing first is the software's got to work. Our industry is notorious for vaporware, so we have to get about 10 or 15, a lot less now when we started, but still getting 25%, 30% companies walking through the doors like, hey, I'd love to sell to a bank and insurance, apparently you can accelerate that. Can I be in your marketplace? Yeah, sure. Let's get to the process. First thing, give me access to your product...oh we're still building and I'm like, well come back when you're done. So first thing is, you bust the vaporware. The second thing is to reduce the maintenance. We actually aggregate everyone else's sandbox or test environments, and then we put a single authentication in all of them. So our customers would, which are the enterprise will log in once and they get access to over 200 vendors and they range from listed companies, Genio and so forth, all the way to some really unique ideas in behavioral quants out of Belgium, right? So it's really about just curating. We're not going for volume, although we have a backlog of 600 companies that we're working through. It's really about having the quality and the relevant companies that banks are interested in in the jurisdictions we operate. So that's one part. So having software, there's a level of vetting that we do from a due diligence point of view. Again, we don't want to put forward companies that are going to fall at the first hurdle when trying to work with enterprise, right? So so we do a level of due diligence. And the key difference is we don't go asking, Hey, show me your BCP plan, because you can do that when you go through the proper, proper onboarding. But really it's like, okay, what's your open source vulnerability scan like? What's your strategy around? So just a couple of those pointed questions where if they had paid attention to it, they would have an answer. Otherwise they kind of would kind of fall apart. So we look at to, to answer your question and summarizing that is, we look at making sure that tech exists. We make sure we do a level of due diligence and we make sure that a level of security posture is in place and they don't spend the next six months then getting security done before getting on board. So those are the little things. And we also get like we also have like three sources of how people come into the fintech, into the marketplace. One is if we're interested in let's say we're interested in wealth tech in us, we're interested in ESG companies in London, in UK, or we're interested in onboarding companies in Middle East, for example, we would go and target and, you know, scan the market, put the call out through our network. We also have a lot of banks who would invite tech companies into the platform because they want to do a run, a proof of concept or a prototype for it. And we have walk ins through the word of mouth. We absolutely zero marketing in terms of getting people into the marketplace.  

Tony [00:06:01] And one of the cool things that you mentioned was kind of this single sign on front end to provide access to all of this capability, for instance. So as you were talking about it, to me being at Intel, we have kind of Azure is our front end. So it's kind of like almost like saying we have the single sign in log in. It sounds like to get access to all these products behind this nice safe space.  

Karan [00:06:25] Yeah, absolutely. The way our customers see it is safe and secure space where they can bring a fintech with data sets that doesn't put their organizations at risk and they're able to do rapid experimentation, build out customer journeys. Some of our customers also bring their customers into the space, and they also do the resilience testing, right? So de-risking integration, for example, our customers are starting to bring their core banking APIs or their CRM products. And basically or let's say we all know we all have those systems that cause us integration nightmares once we've selected vendor to go live with and we hit a two year integration block. So using this sandbox, what you can do is actually bring those product and legacy systems into the environment and as part of the purchase decision, actually run those integration tests way, way ahead before you start the procurement. Tony, the impact we're seeing with our clients is they're able to make a decision, go through the selection process and look at 3 to 4 different vendors in one problem say in 6 to 8 weeks average as compared to 6 to 9 months to evaluate a single vendor and just get beaten into submission of, buying that vendor because, you know, the transformation timelines have not changed. They're still running.  

Tony [00:07:47] And what types of banks or fintechs...what's the most popular types of applications or capabilities that people are looking for in the marketplace nowadays?  

Karan [00:07:56] Tony that's the $42 million question. Every VC person I speak to wants to know what's getting transacted, what's getting sold, which way is the traffic going, what's hot? And the reality is it depends the type of the organization. So is it a regional bank? Is a super regional bank? Is it a large bank? In which jurisdiction as well? So size, jurisdiction and where they are in the state of maturity. So it's not it's not a simple so ok, look, you know, 12 months ago, everyone was looking at ESG companies, right? 12 months later, still everyone's looking at ESG companies just as confused because no one knows like what to do with ESG. That's a bit of a broad statement, but things are improving, but that's still level of reality there. But to answer your questions, I'd say a few areas that are hot. And areas that are hot are financial crime, open banking, embedded finance, ESG, and we're seeing really, really deep interest in digital assets. So it's it's a small group of people sorry, small group of companies, but their interest is very deep. It's not we're not looking around...we're not looking for one or two vendors, we're actually looking to lay down the whole strategy. We're looking to lay down the whole ecosystem within the organization. So, yeah, and payments and reg techs like Evergreen. Everyone needs...it's like a kitchen towel, everyone needs its. 

Tony [00:09:20] Yeah, And just for our listeners, when you say ESG, you're talking about the environmental, social and governance strategy when looking at companies, correct?  

Karan [00:09:28] That's right. Thank you for asking that. So it's retail and commercial banks looking to help their customers get better informed insights into the carbon footprint of the company's carbon footprint. For institutional banks, it's more about how green or what's the, you know, the level of green in the investment loans they're making and that and the tickets they're writing. So that would be the the ESG side of things, be the examples in upfront, but it's also, but that's the external customer facing, but it's also internal. So there's there's you know, there's a number of companies out there and it's getting pretty cool where they're starting to track your laptop, travel, international travel and things like that to work out what's your what your team's footprint and how that breaks down. So it's quite unique.  

Tony [00:10:20] And in terms of where you guys run, I believe your goal is to kind of be cloud agnostic. Is that the case right now? And also, I guess hardware agnostic, because as a oneAPI podcast, we kind of care about that, both cloud and hardware agnostic? 

Karan [00:10:35] Yeah, absolutely. One of our strengths is actually being cloud agnostic and being able to be hardware agnostic on the back of that, to then be able to work with a number of providers such as the open API and number of products we were working with Intel on. And the reason that's a strength is when an organization is, you know, everyone's on a multi multi-cloud strategy these days, but everyone's only just on one cloud with with a little bit of backup somewhere else. And, and with us you're actually able to run multi clouds within. At any given time, which means if you're trying to work with a tech provider, one's on Azure or one's on AWS, you're actually able to do that regardless of where we've hosted your digital transformation platform. The plan is to continue to add more and more cloud providers.  

Tony [00:11:27] That makes sense. The resilience, I'm sure, is very important to the financial sector as well.  

Karan [00:11:32]  Absolutely drives a lot of behavior, the resilience, right? So I mean, we're in the testing rapid prototyping test before you buy de-risking integration where we're in that early space. And as we get deeper and, you know, build out the next set of our product roadmap, I'd say we'd have to be multi-cloud ourself, not just be able to support and access to multi-cloud.  

Tony [00:12:01] That makes sense. And I think when you and I were talking a little bit in the past, we were talking about why be part of the oneAPI for Startups program? And you you mentioned that it's not necessarily something you necessarily need for your platform, although I would imagine some of the nice secure things that Intel can help you with. For instance, the security with SGX, Gramine and some of these vertical security products that we have, I think probably add value with you. But also you mentioned that there are people coming in who need to write accelerated code, right? Code that needs to run on hardware more efficiently. And you mentioned that that was one of the good reasons to be part of the oneAPI for Startups program.  

Karan [00:12:43] Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a unique partnership and relationship that we have because as you guys are releasing new products into their market and you're wanting people to jump on it and try for different use cases. I guess we've got the other side where people are looking for new products and looking at new products to see how they can do their accelerated development and accelerated execution. So and I'm just being conscious of how much we can we can say here for some of these, you know, we were able to, you know, together we were able to bring banks and actually test some of those products to see for different blockchain use cases, which  would have been possible earlier, but it was possible a lot faster and a lot less riskier for all three organizations, right? So that's the best part that I like about working with oneAPI and working with Intel is the ability and the quite frankly, the innovative nature of your product development and these products to kind of go, okay, yeah, we've got the product, we've tested it. Anyone want to, anyone want to come give it a test drive? And I was like, okay, well we've got a couple of financial service customers who are actually, you know, top of their game and innovative in their in their mindset. And they're happy to give this a go without risking their customers and organization exposure. They're basically like, okay, so it's a unique one. I really like it.  

Tony [00:14:15] Yeah, and we're really excited about it too. So we're obviously Intel's moving into the space where we have this Intel Developer Cloud that allows us to give people access to kind of the latest hardware to come in and try their software stacks on that platform where we're hosting the back end and making sure that the hardware is in the right state and the software stack is in the right state to allow people to come in and make sure that their software runs latest and greatest. So that's that's exciting for us as we kind of kick that off throughout this year.  

Tony [00:14:43] So I'm going to shift gears here a little bit and talk to you and ask you about your journey into becoming a founder CEO. One of the things that I like to do with everybody who comes into the podcast, who's part of the startups program is to kind of see their career journey, because I think it adds a lot of value to people who are listening, who are considering potentially taking that same, I'll say, leap of faith to go from working in an existing company to go out and say, I need to do something new and unique. So can you talk about how you ended up where you are here?  

Karan [00:15:15] How long have you got?  

Tony [00:15:16] As long as you want.  

Karan [00:15:19] Okay. The medium version, that's hopefully interesting to your audience. So my background is engineering and accountant and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. So I thought, hey, if the world is in growth mode, they all need engineers. And I thought if the world was in a consolidation mode, they all need accountants, so I'm not sure what I want to do. I'll do both. And I actually started working as an accountant while I was still at uni and, you know, did a couple of years at that. That gave me good grounding in business and concepts and actually, you know, how finance actually works, real finance in terms of when it comes to accounting. Then, it was very much around, okay, cool, you've done accounting, let's do some engineering. So I went and tried about six different engineering jobs, basically realized I loved talking to people, loved solving problems, loved helping people. And it's like, okay, as an engineer in my cubicle back in the day, I'm not helping very many people. I didn't feel like I was helping people. So believe it or not, it's like, I don't know what I actually want to do and I came across this title as business analyst and I read the job description and this is... it was probably just our job. It didn't make any sense to me. It's like, okay, this is pretty confusing. Let me apply for this. I'm sure I can do it. And that's how I actually got into banking, right? From from having been worked at smelter factories as an engineer accountant. Mobile was like that...that was my introduction. And I have a look back that was like that was 20 years ago. And I just enjoy, I understood banking, I enjoyed banking, I understood how things you work on inside the bank, yes, it takes a while, but it has a real impact on day to day, you and me. And then in terms of what we do with our finances. So also, you know, so did did a range of things. Capital markets was one of them. Insurance wealth management gave me different different bunch of different roles but in the last ten years, probably sat in COO and CEO offices, rolling out strategic programs, maybe regulatory or maybe transformation or new platforms as like a school. And then my last role was basically being CIO for for Westpac, for the European America's business. And yeah, I thought that's what I thought working with fintechs was it was the right thing. And you know, had this had this speed issue and I thought maybe I didn't know something. And then I reached out to a few CIOs and CTO in the market, it turned out everyone was suffering. And I was like, Well, why is everyone so smart just suffering through this? And then just dig deeper, deeper, deeper. That's that's how it got there. And the whole journey to CEO. I think it's an ongoing one, my friend. I think I learn every day. I start off with, I know I got it. And it's just like you soon realize like, yeah,  you've got tomorrow to look forward to how much you're going to learn more. It's actually is really exciting. It's like now if you make a mistake or now you, you learn something. It's the happiest you feel it's like, okay, I'm so much richer. Cause that's, that's, that's big part of doing it for me. Yeah.  

Tony [00:18:45] That makes sense. I'm also curious, as you were talking about your journey, I know a lot of engineers, not necessarily who are going to take the leap of faith and become a CEO or found a company, although I'm sure there are plenty. But for you, what was that like, emotionally? As you decided, I'm going to go... I've identified the problem. I know there's a problem out there. How did you take that information and then get to the point where you say, I'm actually going to create a business that's going to solve this problem out there for more than just me or more, you know, beyond the realm of things that I can already control. Because that kind of takes a leap of faith. Right? You know, there's a problem, but how do you know people are going to adopt your solution? Why is it worth taking that job?  

Karan [00:19:30] Uh, a lot of interviews, a lot of data. You can't park your engineering brain. You can't just take a leap of faith, especially from a from a nice, comfortable banking job into a founder CEO role of a young start up where you actually sell in to banks, where the life cycles, a lot of sales life cycles are long. And on the other side you got fintechs and so it's the regulated space. So it's not it's not you know these are these are emotionally and it still is like super exciting because you recognize and you go you actually address in a real problem, which is actually helping the banks build better products for their consumers. And it's actually helping the fintechs get more sales. If they're not selling, they're getting feedback on the product, which means they're improving the products on this side. So at our job and our mission is to enable the financial services industry to build better products for consumers, enable them with technology. It doesn't have to be the most complicated thing. It just has to be the right thing. That's like keep it simple. So emotionally, like I'm pumped about it every day. Uh, you know, today we, we is at an event earlier, which is UK FinTech Week as I'm based out of London, and we had the UK regulator, the FCA, get on the stage for the keynote and basically say, Hey, we've got this digital sandbox, it's always going to be open. The industry is welcome to come and collaborate between banks fintechs as a means to build better products, leverage synthetic data that that they're having, putting in. And they didn't mention us right and no problem because most founders and CEOs will be upset. It's like, oh wait, where are my PR coins? Why am I not getting any marketing out of this? The whole team here is so stoked because we know we enabled the regulator to enable the industry to bring together to build better products. Right So so I think. Well, we're pretty mission driven. Yes. Where, you know, most of us are bankers and scale up people. So we're not we're not a charity. Don't take that mission for us being a charity. But yeah, emotionally that mission is pretty strong.  

Tony [00:21:41] And so that's. I was going to ask you, what's your favorite part about it? But it sounds like the getting up in the thrill of actually solving the problem and making progress. Is it something that really drives you... 

Karan [00:21:51] Changing the industry is the best, the favorite part, and it's not an easy one, right? So it's changing how industry works with each other.  

Tony [00:21:59] Yeah, that's actually really interesting. I've talked to many people about having different types of start ups, and every time it comes to something that's highly regulated, I always get scared.  

Karan [00:22:11] Yeah, and we're not regulated where we're helping everyone that's regulated. We're not regulated.  

Tony [00:22:15] Right. But that's still just like even getting in that space, having to consider all the different moving pieces. I guess that's why it's a good thing you kind of already understood that. So you knew kind of where you fit in your niche and and how you could actually help drive solutions. As as a startup, though, I'll ask you the other question, which is what's the hardest part about being a startup? So I give some examples. Some people say it's going in front of investors and trying to raise money. Sometimes it's actually figuring out exactly what the customer wants, which maybe don't start a startup, then maybe that. But yeah. What do you find the hardest about being a startup?  

Karan [00:22:53] For me, it's the operating system. It's putting the operating system in place. Getting a team used to it. And by the time a process sticks, you're ready for your next stage and get to do it again. So actually what I'm working on at the moment is. Being good at designing operating systems, rolling them out, getting them sticky and be able to evolve from that because otherwise the whole team is going to be in a constant state of flux, which isn't good for them. So that's that's like if you asked me what am I thinking about, what's keeping me up is actually that because we're not talking about one person, we're talking about a whole team here. And if you can't if you don't have them lined up pointing and you know, they're good, there's not an issue here, but to get the most...feng shui out of the team, if I make sense. This is to have those operating systems where they can operate independently.  

Tony [00:23:53] Yeah, that makes sense. And again, I'll I'll circle back for our listeners. When you say operating system, obviously you're talking about the processes for running and organizing your business properly. Usually when we talk about operating systems, it's usually we're talking about Linux or Windows or something like that.  

Karan [00:24:09] And this is the NayaOne operating system we're talking about.  

Tony [00:24:16] Yeah, no, I think it's good though, because I think that one of the things that we hear when we talk to engineers who have founded companies, usually we we focus a lot on the solutions. And starting a company, founding a company is not just coming up with a good idea or a solution. And even making that solution work, it's actually creating a business and figuring out how do I make the business work? Not the solution, but actually the business. So it sounds like you guys are on your path kind of in both directions, and that's what really makes for a great and sustainable startup.  

Karan [00:24:54] Yeah. Cheers Tony, cause if I compare us to like the industry metrics like we don't fit in at all like we would breakthrough like all revenue targets kind of thing and there's no me boasting is just saying like just thing we do is a still niche.  And the markets kind of waking up. Like oh, there is a better way of working. But we haven't we have a different like it's it's a weird challenge or opportunity, whichever way you want to call it. But it's like, like it's not the cash that's the problem. It's not the solution. That's a problem. It's like, how do you build a fluid organization that's not so fluid that nothing makes sense? Because I think that. I've got a trading background. Trading technology. Always think about the alpha, right? So what's the alpha that NayaOne has as a business? And alpha is the is basically what's the edge you have on someone else's trade that you're going to make more, you know, better margin or a better trade. So it's so what's, what's, what's the alpha for us. That's, that's another and I think it's in the operating system I think it's how and it's got to be, it will be different for everybody. It's not it's not a secret. So yeah, lots of thinking and research and going on. Lots of trying.  

Tony [00:26:16] Yeah. Yeah. And I think you mentioned, you mentioned that you're based in the UK and your platform right now because of not maybe the regulations around you, but the regulations around the financial industry. Is it true that you only function in the UK, are you worldwide? How does that work for NayaOne?  

Karan [00:26:36] We're global, we're live in three jurisdictions UK, Europe and the US. So as of earlier this year we're live in U.S. and where we're gaining, happy to say, good traction, I like the American banks, you know, there's a portion of them they see it, they're happy to move, that's that's very encouraging.  

Tony [00:26:58] All right. So that almost concludes that the amount of time that we have with you, I appreciate your time. I know as a CEO, you must be very busy. A lot of our listeners probably don't typically think about solutions in the financial space. Maybe we'll change that as I talk to more startups throughout the year, I think we have a couple other financial startups in the pipeline. But if you had to sum up where NayaOne is really bringing the value, and also where do you hope this technology takes your industry, which might be different than the tech industry in the next few years?  

Karan [00:27:32] Deep, deep question. So where we add value, that's that simple. And that is basically speed, time to market, time to value, collaboration between different organizations to build products and get value into end consumers hand, right or in the business customers hand. So that's where we add value. And we do that with a range of things different fintechs, different data sets, different technologies, security, analytics. Where I think the technologies go, and that is a big crystal ball question, I think there's... and you can break it up like... Can I maybe have that question where I'd like it to go?  

Tony [00:28:13] Yeah, absolutely. Where do you want it to go?  

Karan [00:28:16] The thing I would appreciate the most when it comes to technology adoption would be organizations getting more comfortable with privacy enhancement technologies and getting comfortable with sharing data with each other for the better outcome for the for the net, better outcome. And I think by that, you know, we talk about open banking, talk about open finance and better finance and, you know, generative A.I. and Web3 combine all of that and put in next to that, we can safely, securely transact data with each other without putting anyone's customers and professional commercial IP at risk. That is a real game changer. I there is, and it might be a human problem here because technology could probably do it. Technology can do it as we know it, but humans getting comfortable, hence the technology adoption, I think that's a real game changer for the for the for the industry and for the society in general.  

Tony [00:29:15] Yeah. So it sounds like figuring out how to leverage data in a way that is safe for individuals but still can drive solutions forward. Is what you're saying?  

Karan [00:29:27] Yeah. Yeah. That's a that's a very nice. I mean, humans are complicated, but simple. Right. So technology needs to have simple outcomes. Yes. There's a lot that goes in the background to make to get it there. But end of the day, simplicity is king. And you know that that's that's, that's that's how we think about now. If you ask me what's what's our IP, it's no deep tech, magic going on here. Yeah, I'm sure there is. And I'm sure the engineering team wouldn't like me saying that. But end of the day, it's the simplicity. Simplicity is our IP of how simply we're able to connect people and enable them with technology.  

Tony [00:30:11] That's a good one. And good engineers, if they get upset saying simplicity is key. I think as an engineer, I'd say good engineering should result in simplicity for the user. And it sounds like you guys are going there. So that's sounds like a good goal. You drive that in the financial space and Intel will continue to support you, of course, and hopefully will drive that across a wide range of industries.  

Karan [00:30:35] Agree. Look forward to it.  

Tony [00:30:38] All right. Well, thank you for joining us today, Karen.  

Karan [00:30:41] Thank you, Tony. Appreciate the questions.  

Tony [00:30:44] And thank you, our listener. And join us next time when we talk more technology and trends in industry.