Accelerating Innovation: Technology Adoption in Financial Services with Karan Jain, Founder and CEO of NayaOne

In this episode we speak with Karan Jain, Founder and CEO of NayaOne about his WHY, WHAT and HOW when it comes to helping Financial Institutions discover, select and evaluate technical solution providers.

Karan Jain explores how his platform accelerates technology adoption for financial institutions, enabling faster proof-of-concepts and reducing buyer's regret. He discusses future trends in embedded banking, financial management, and industry consolidation, emphasizing the importance of interoperable technology and strategic foresight to prepare for a rapidly evolving landscape.

Key Words:

• Karan Jain
• Naya One
• Technology adoption
• Financial services
• Embedded banking
• Innovation acceleration
• Proof-of-concept
• Buyer’s regret
• Interoperable technology
• Future-ready strategy
• Financial inclusion
• Industry consolidation
• Synthetic data
• Banking transformation

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Banking on Information. Today, with me is Karan Jain, the founder and CEO of Naya One. Welcome to the podcast, Karan. Thank you, Rutger. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. Great. Well. We always start with this very important question, which is why do you do what you do? I love that question and the more I answer it, um, the stronger it gets. So there's a commercial reason for what we do, what we do, and there's a, there's a personal reason for what we do. The commercial reason is enterprises need to buy tech and the old way of buying tech is broken. If nothing you know if you got to move at pace by the time you have an idea you get it to market it takes you two to three years, and in the meantime someone's had two new iPhones.

Like your customers aren't happy, right? So you got to move at pace; you got to buy technology; you got to move fast, and that's what we enable for our customers so buying technology isn't going away, and that's kind of the commercial reason that's kind of what you know motivates us to change the industry we work in to help enterprises adopt technology faster. The personal reason is when I was when I was working in the enterprise, I found how hard it was to buy technology or to experiment with technology, See how I can get new technology to our customers. And you'd often meet young companies with great ideas, but the world's kind of stacked up against them, like in terms of, you know, how quickly can they get inside the organization?

How quickly can they get to the room? You know, is the product at a banking level? Is the product at, you know, you know. Like it's bank-ready, basically. And I found that creating something that gives them levels of playing field is probably the right thing to do for the society. So, if someone who doesn't have all the contacts and all the right banks and doesn't have all the contacts to get all the right tech friends and whatever, but has a great product idea, that's going to be good for you know. You're my kids then we should give them an opportunity level the playing field and get the product out so between those two reasons we get pretty we keep pretty excited um as a team to do what we do um and I kind of reflect in our name as well um Naya one so Naya is Sanskrit for new and One is basically One place so you know for our customers it's one place to go by technology for new for transformation

That's what the name comes from as well. So you're passionate about making things easier, leveling the playing field, speeding things up, and helping people with innovation. Yeah. And I think we're passionate even more deeply about making better society, better financial products, better financial inclusion, right? So if that's stuck in someone's head and they can't get it to market, that's what we want to accelerate at the end of the day. In the process, yes, we end up accelerating everybody else that's before them. Yeah, no, that is great. Now, what is it that Naya One does? What use cases do you solve for for your customers? Yeah, so, you know, we work with FIs, regulators, central banks, and now growingly all the enterprises. And we basically help them with tech adoption.

What does that mean? So these organizations want and need to buy new technology to gain new customers, to retain existing customers, to stop fraud, stop cybersecurity risk. All of that requires buying technology. Now, the old way of buying technology takes somewhere between six to 18 months, and with so many vendors in the market it's really hard to know which one you should buy because hey does it even do what they're saying is there or even step before does it even exist or is it slide where um so then it's about okay does it actually exist does it do what it says it does is it going to work with the stack or you know inside my organization, so that's what we help our customers solve so we help them basically accelerate their proof of concepts and pilots from what it might take 12 months average to an organization we bring that down to four weeks, that's what we help them, so you go into the Nyxel platform

You've got a couple of hundred vendors there in different ecosystems. You've got synthetic data and secure environments. You'll be able to do a proof of concept in weeks. That would typically take, and also what we found is reduces the risk of buyer's regret that people have. And people who've bought software before have got PTSD from buying bad software that they've either bought the wrong thing or they've bought and now it's sat on the shelf for two to three years and can't go anywhere. And with the changing customer behavior and expectations, that's what we help accelerate. Great. So you make that much faster. And I do remember that from the time that I was in banking. That it was always great that you found a solution provider. You're like, hey, this is great.

They can solve my problem. And then you had to go through this really long process of onboarding them, getting them through InfoSec, getting everyone to weigh in. And then to your point, like it was two iPhones later, by the time you actually got them onboarded, and then you were crossing your fingers that it was actually going to do what they said it would do. The longer it went, the stronger the feeling was that you were crossing your fingers because you know you had your political capital involved and invested now right? You put your hands up for it, um, so like typically the use cases would be: hey, I want to run a proof of concept with one vendor; I want to compare three vendors uh side by side, so in that case they would have the same data set, same KPI, same infrastructure-really can compare them next to each other.

I want to build out a customer journey or a transformation journey; I want to de-risk integration; I want to run hackathons. Will be the top five use cases that our customers use the platform for. Perfect. Yeah. And then what is the value they get out of it? We touched upon it a little bit, but let's articulate that very, very clearly. What do customers that you work with sort of say, hey, this is what that did for us? Speed and cost, right? So help them basically accelerate their job outcomes, which is, hey, I need to, if you're in a product line, I need to get product to my customers. If you're in technology team, I need to help deliver this and I want to pick the best technology that's future-proof.

If I'm in an innovation, I want to work with the other two and I want to get the best outcome for the organization or the bank. Those are the three types of people we're working with. And the value for them that 911 drives is speed, certainty of the solution they're picking, add a fraction of a cost. Yeah. And sometimes it's even just the hurdle making it possible, right? Because some people might just give up trying to go through their own internal process. So maybe that's even the first benefit that you deliver, that people actually have the possibility of trying something out. You know, you bring up a very interesting point because my read on the industry is I think our colleagues in the industry are.

Pretty beaten down by that process already right, so if they you know if they were in a conference or they were told you know talking to us and we tell them a good solution it's going to take a lot for them to go through that process because they know how hard it is to go through that six to 12 month process to get in a vendor in and also um everyone's really busy now you know the jobs have changed, the climates you know the so. So to your point, 100%, it opens that up. But in my head, given how many banks I speak to on a daily basis, I think that's just the new norm. But you're right. The ability to innovate is real. The ability to try.

The ability to explore is real. Yeah, that's great. There's this one thing I like to do, which is called futures thinking. So it is thinking about possible futures. We don't know what the future is going to hold. speculate and we can think about what a possible future could look like. So if we look 10 years out, so 2034, what do you see out in the future? What does the market look like? What does the banking financial services landscape look like? Paint me a picture of that. Yeah, that's an interesting question. Great question. I think number one thing that comes to mind is-the banking or the financial services will become more and more embedded, right? So, you know, there's different ways, lifestyle banking, embedded banking, invisible banking. There's different people call it different things.

And I'm sure there's a split line, you know, hair split difference between them all. But at the end of the day, there's more experiences like Uber and delivery where you don't see your finances and you're consuming services, right? Number one. The flip side of that is I think your financial management has a long way to go. so i think pulling people out of debt helping people manage their finances better i think is a thing that i'd like to see improve over the next 10 years because i think it's a very under invested area at the moment the other thing i see expect to happen is massive consolidation um where you'll have you know we think there's there's, you know, there's a oligopoly between core providers and dah, dah, dah, dah.

Wait till you wait, wait another 10 years. You're going to see even more at different areas, and who owns the experience and who's, who's owning the customer. So I think like who's going to own the customer in 10 years is anyone's wild guess right now. I think I do think, I do believe like people, people say banking is a commodity and I still do believe that. Um, but I think that doesn't mean that banking is extinct or like you know banks are extinct; I think they just and we're seeing that now they're getting redefined or like they go they're going through the change, and I think I think banks have proven over last 10 years that they hold a very important role in society, and I don't think that's going anywhere.

Yeah, so 10 years from now, banks will still be around. There might be some consolidation and they will be much more embedded, right? So much more financing at the point of need when customers actually need their financing. That is very interesting. So, what does that mean for today? If we do backcasting and we sort of say, 'hey, what do we need to get ready for that possible future?' How do we do that? I think, and just on that consolidation, I mean, banking getting consolidated is a given. I was actually referring to more about consolidation cross-industry. A bank and a consumer good brand getting merged together is probably what I see to really bring that to life. So, what do we need to do to get ready? I think having your tech and data.

Interoperable future-ready is one thing like that's a given; otherwise, you don't have pace, you don't have speed. Number two, um, even before that, is knowing what you will want to be when you grow up, almost or, you know, what's the path or non-regret like? Are you doing what you're doing in next 10 years, or are you doing something different because you've got to be testing that right now, um, and seeing what the what the demand is like, or a version of that? So I think you know to get ready is I'll say get your house in order because like there's always stuff anybody can do even the largest of banks, but it's more about being future-proof and being interoperable as possible, and having business strategy uh, and that are being applied to not only just your tech but also to your business strategy. It's probably how I think about it. That is great. And obviously, you want to be fast in your prototyping and getting ready and trying out solutions. And that's probably where people can use your platform for. That is probably a good point to wrap it up. Thank you very much, Karan, for being on the podcast. Thank you, Rutger. This was a great discussion. And until next time, choose to be curious.