We are Hypto — and it’s day 0!
The What and Why?
“We believe that developers are going to lead the biggest transformation in finance in the coming decade”
Background
Hypto started in 2018 with a vision to democratize access to financial products for everyone. As we built our first product, a loyalty management & analytics platform for offline retailers, we spent nearly 80% of our time integrating with banks and card networks.
As we built that product, we went one step closer to understanding the real bottlenecks to democratizing finance. We discovered a clear gap in adoption of technology within financial institutions.
We were constantly reminded of Marc Andreessen’s quote — “software is eating the world”, but the world of finance seems to be eaten a decade slower.
Thinking from first principles, banking can be broken down into 3 basic components — a balance sheet, the technology that leverages the balance sheet into providing a suite of financial use-cases and the interface with customers.
With the surge in demand for financial use-cases, the gap in technology is ever so magnified. The core stack has not changed in the last 30 years making customers still depend on outdated legacy systems written in mainframe languages that were built only for physical branch banking.
While neo-banks and other digitally native financial apps are trying to solve for the interface layer and a substantial segment of fintechs are monetizing the connections to these legacy stacks, we noticed a sincere lack of investment in redefining the core infrastructure layer.
What Hypto does
We fundamentally believe that without modularizing and improving the core infrastructure, the bottlenecks in building financial products will not be solved.
We are thus breaking down finance into its primitive components, such as systems to identify and store value (monetary or otherwise), protocols to move value and business logic layers that can be used to create a new generation of highly accessible and scalable financial products. We believe this will inspire every developer & business to build their own set of financial products which are at the cutting edge of technology.
Instead of monetizing the connections to financial institutions, we are open-sourcing connectors to foster a community that improves access to financial services globally by getting the smartest people to collaborate on the hardest problems in finance.
Our vision is to enable any developer — from an individual to a large organization — to use these foundational web services & connectors to experiment and innovate rapidly without the need to worry about managing the infrastructure or integrating with financial institutions.
Track record
We have been working with banks and other financial institutions to unbundle their legacy monolith stacks into a developer-first cloud based web services platform that ensures a level playing field for everyone with an innovative financial use case. We launched our first stack that supports payments infrastructure in March 2020. The Hypto payments platform is built from 5 web service modules — wallet (accounts) service, ledger service, recon service, payment connectors and an intelligent routing logic that ensures 99.99% availability and 99%+ success rate. The platform has processed over 50Mn+ transactions till date with a monthly run rate of over USD 2 Bn across 2000+ developers/tech platforms. We are currently working with over 10 banks including RBL Bank, Yesbank, ICICI, DBS, Axis and Kotak.
Future
End user banking experience is a function of the presentation layer of the financial. While we have many fintechs looking at the presentation layer, such as the neo-banks and digital lenders, there are almost none looking at creating innovative financial products that are based on a unique customer insight. This is because the technology stack exists today as a monolith and was built for financial products that are multi-decades old. We are re-imagining the core components of banking as individual primitives that banks and fintechs can use to come together and create stellar financial experiences for the end user.
For an explosion of use cases in fintech, we do not want to be guessing what those use cases are since those would be based on our notion of what the past is. Hence, we are building the foundational components as primitive banking services combined with open-source deployable connectors so that developers will take care of the creativity themselves.
We truly believe in creating a community of open minded, empathetic, smart people and providing them with challenging problems to own & solve. If this sounds interesting, write to bestdaysofyourlife@hypto.in and we will work together to be a great mutual fit.
