Banking Infratech, Deepfake Era KYC and the Compliance Advantage
An Exclusive Interview with S. Anand, Founder and CEO, PaySprint, India’s B2B Banking Fintech and Regtech Infrastructure Company In this exclusive conversation with SugerMint, S. Anand, Founder and CEO of. . .
An Exclusive Interview with S. Anand, Founder and CEO, PaySprint, India’s B2B Banking Fintech and Regtech Infrastructure CompanyIn this exclusive conversation with SugerMint, S. Anand, Founder and CEO of PaySprint, India’s B2B banking fintech and regtech infrastructure company, talks about India’s decisive shift from growth at all costs fintech to infrastructure led resilience, the engineering behind powering over 5,100 partners through 200+ API solutions, why identity fraud in the deepfake era demands layered intelligence, and his conviction that compliance, engineered in from day one, is the most underrated competitive advantage in financial services. How has the definition of fintech success in India shifted from acquiring sheer user volume to building resilient, infrastructure led systems?S. Anand:For a long time, success in Indian fintech was measured in downloads and gross transaction value. Everyone was chasing the consumer, and the numbers looked spectacular right up until they didn’t. What the last few years have taught the ecosystem, sometimes painfully, is that scale without resilience is just risk wearing a good outfit. The definition has genuinely changed now, and the investment patterns prove it. As per IDC, digital transformation spending by Asia Pacific banks is projected to grow from around 30. 4 billion dollars to 48. 6 billion dollars by 2027, and that money is flowing into infrastructure, data and resilience, not user acquisition. The companies that matter today are the ones building the plumbing, the rails that thousands of other businesses quietly depend on. When we started PaySprint in 2020, it was on a simple conviction that banking infrastructure should work for everyone. That meant building for uptime, for auditability, for the boring things that never trend on social media but decide whether a business survives a regulatory cycle. Success today is measured in trust, and trust compounds far slower than user volume, but it also doesn’t evaporate overnight. What technical hurdles arise when scaling a unified platform to power over 5,100 partners through 200+ distinct APIs?S. Anand:The honest answer is that the hardest problems are rarely the glamorous ones. When you’re running more than 200 API solutions across seven product verticals for over 5,100 partners, your biggest enemies are inconsistency and fragility. Every partner integrates differently, transacts at different volumes and has different failure tolerances. A marketplace processing thousands of payouts an hour and an NBFC running due diligence checks have completely different definitions of what working well means. So the real engineering challenge is uniformity, making sure that the five thousandth partner gets the same performance, the same documentation quality and the same predictability as the first. We solved for this by treating the platform as one unified stack rather than a collection of products stitched together. One integration, one foundation. It also means investing heavily in things partners never see, solution architects, proactive monitoring and priority SLAs, because at this scale, support is a product too. How does PaySprint ensure continuous compliance across its platform amid India’s evolving regulatory landscape?S. Anand:We made a decision very early that compliance would be engineered into the platform, not bolted on after the fact. That single choice shapes everything. The platform is RBI and NPCI compliant by design, ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, with end to end encryption, multi factor authentication and audit readiness built in from day one. The regulatory landscape in India is evolving quickly, and I think that’s a good thing. The RBI is essentially writing the rulebook for a digital financial system at a scale no other country has attempted. Companies that treat each new circular as a fire drill will always be exhausted. We treat regulatory alignment as a product requirement, which means when the rules tighten, we’re usually already standing where the regulator wants the industry to move. That’s what I mean when I say compliance first is not a constraint, it’s an advantage. It accelerates trust, and in financial services, trust is the entire business. That philosophy has also translated into external validation, including the Gold Award for Data Privacy, Security and Protection at India Digital Summit 2026 for SprintEX-Code. What automated risk models and data points does your SprintVerify suite employ to detect identity fraud during onboarding?S. Anand:Identity fraud has changed character entirely. A few years ago the threat was forged documents. Today it’s synthetic identities and deepfakes, and the quality of AI generated forgeries means the human eye is no longer a reliable line of defence. As per Gartner, by 2026 nearly 30 percent of enterprises will no longer consider identity verification and authentication solutions reliable in isolation because of AI generated deepfake attacks on face biometrics. That prediction is playing out in real time, and it’s exactly the environment SprintVerify was built for. SprintVerify is our AI driven verification suite covering KYC, KYB, bank account verification and identity checks. Rather than relying on any single check, it works on layered intelligence, cross referencing multiple data points and signals during onboarding so that inconsistencies surface even when an individual document looks perfect. The suite supports fraud intelligence and business and financial due diligence, which matters because fraud today is rarely a lone bad document, it’s a pattern. The goal is simple, let genuine customers through faster and make life progressively harder for everyone else. Speed and safety are usually framed as a trade off. Done right, they’re the same feature. What systemic operational risks are driving increased adoption of automated Escrow as a Service platforms like SprintEXcrow?S. Anand:Counterparty risk is the oldest problem in commerce, and digitisation didn’t remove it, it multiplied the number of strangers doing business with each other. Marketplaces paying sellers they’ve never met, real estate transactions with large sums in limbo, supply chains where goods and money move on different timelines. In each of these, someone has to trust first, and that trust gap is where disputes, defaults and fraud live. That’s exactly what SprintEXcrow addresses. It’s a secure escrow platform that holds funds in a transparent, automated structure until every condition of the transaction is met, built on trusted bank partnerships and dedicated trustees, with custom escrow solutions across industries. What’s driving adoption is that businesses have realised escrow isn’t a legal formality, it’s operational infrastructure. When the release of money is tied automatically to the fulfilment of conditions, entire categories of disputes simply stop happening. You’re not managing risk anymore, you’ve designed it out. What integration design choices allow PaySprint to support partners ranging from early stage startups to legacy enterprise institutions?S. Anand:We had to build for two audiences that usually get served by entirely different vendors. A startup wants to integrate over a weekend. A bank wants to interrogate your architecture for six months before touching it. Serving both meant making some deliberate choices. First, developer experience is non negotiable. Our APIs are high performance and developer friendly, documented in a way that a small team can move fast without hand holding. Second, the platform is engineered for enterprise grade performance underneath that simplicity, high transaction volumes, scalability and the security posture that banks, NBFCs and large corporates demand. Third, enterprise support is structured, not improvised, with solution architects, priority SLAs and proactive monitoring. The philosophy is simple, one platform, one integration, whether you’re a proptech startup or a legacy institution. The startup grows into the enterprise features rather than outgrowing the platform. That’s how you keep a partner for a decade instead of a funding cycle. How will the convergence of RegTech, EscrowTech and core banking infrastructure define the next decade of Indian financial services?S. Anand:I genuinely believe this convergence is the story of the next decade, and it’s the ground PaySprint has deliberately chosen to stand on. For years these were separate conversations, banking infrastructure did the moving of money, regtech did the reporting, escrow sat with lawyers. That separation is ending because the market and the regulator are both demanding systems where trust, compliance and transactions are inseparable. The broader technology cycle supports this. As per IDC, 2026 marks a shift from AI experimentation to accountability, where enterprises expect digital investments to demonstrably improve processes and decision making, with banking among the largest spending industries globally. In financial services, that accountability translates directly into demand for infrastructure where compliance and trust are built into the transaction itself. Picture financial infrastructure where verification, escrow protection, contract management and payments operate as one continuous fabric. Onboarding that’s fraud resistant by default. Transactions that settle only when obligations are met. Contracts, through platforms like our SprintContractX, that connect directly to the money they govern. Compliance that’s generated by the system rather than assembled for the auditor. That’s not a distant vision, it’s what we’re building today at the convergence of fintech, regtech and escrowtech. The next decade of Indian financial services won’t be defined by who acquires the most users. It will be defined by who builds infrastructure the entire ecosystem can safely stand on. That’s the future we’re architecting, one API at a time. Are you an Entrepreneur or Startup?Do you have a Success Story to Share?SugerMint would like to share your success story. 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