CEO Insights Magazine

Right from global leaders like the CEO of Google Sundar Pichai to the honorable Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur has scores of proud alumni who once walked through the aisles of the esteemed institution and are constantly making their mark in various spheres of life. One among this elite list, the co-founder of Karza Technologies Alok Kumar describes his journey with IIT to be phenomenal and of everlasting impact, which ultimately helped him to evolve into the individual that he is today. Owing to his association with computer science, especially ML, AI, and Big data, Alok began understanding the first principles and the roots of algorithms that are transforming the world today. The journey equipped him to become an ardent problem solver and leader. With the aim of offering matchless financial solutions using state-of-theart deep learning models, big data, and creative robotic process automation, he co-founded Karza Technologies along with Omkar Shirhatti and Gaurav Samdaria. Today, it is known as the largest data, analytics, automation, and decision making solution provider to FIs catering to the entire lending lifecycle from onboarding to diligence & monitoring to collections.

Below is an excerpt from Alok’s interaction with CEO Insights.

Take us through your professional background. What inspired you to foray into IT?
My career began as a data scientist with Morgan Stanley, where I was exposed to working with AI; solving real world problems. After around 3 and a half years, I and my co-founders launched Karza Technologies to reboot the finance sector and help brands multiply their effective ness using data and automation technologies.

It was quite natural for me to choose this niche space owing to

my education in computer science and my inclination toward Big Data. Also, I was fascinated by the idea of applying core mathematics, engineering concepts and AI algorithms to solve problems.

Tell us about Karza Technologies and its position in the market.
The finance industry is known to be vulnerable; it’s prone to high taxes and fraudulent activities as well. We wanted to simplify the customers’ journey and offer a seamless experience with credible solutions. We intended, persevered and succeeded to combat the rising NPAs and Loan fraud with big data analytics, business intelligence, and machine learning, Karza Technologies came into the picture. We built a team of innovators, thinkers & doers and conceptualized Karza in the dynamic landscape of financial technology Industry in 2015. Today, Karza is building an intelligent system that analyses the data and crawls the Internet for lurking signals that will either raise a red flag or a green one about the credit worthiness of the borrowing outfit.

Apart from financial information, Karza’s team of experts drawn from the financial, technological, consulting, and banking industries, have created a repository of over 100 fraud scenarios in our relentless effort to look out for even the most subtle hints that’ll indicate a borrower could be planning a fraud or might turn delinquent in the near future. Over the years, we have been striving to enable faster decision making and derive accurate insights.

What are the company’s greatest strengths and unique propositions it offers to its clients?
We can proudly say that we are a one stop shop that stays with the lenders throughout their journey. We are at the juncture of everything a client needs right from onboarding to carrying out background checks, risk analysis and assessing the

credit worthiness of borrowers not just on their track record but also on their future potential and intent to repay loans.

The second differentiating aspect is our progressive technology itself. We have built a state of-the-art solution to solve core problems with high OCR accuracy. While being mindful of the context and scenario of our country, we offer India's first approach to cognitive services. Apart from this, we have tapped into millions of entities, proudly hosting the largest data lake.

Reflect on some of the initial challenges you have experienced as an entrepreneur? How did you overcome them and what did you learn from them?
I strongly believe that there is no leader without a team. The first and foremost challenge for any entrepreneur would be building a great team. Now, why I call it a challenge is because of our principles. There were good candidates out there, but most of them were stuck to the bookish knowledge. Not many were ready to ask the whys and hows to come up with a philosophy. The kind of problems we solve needed innovators. Finding such a lean and efficient team was one of the crucial challenges we encountered. In order to hire the right talent, I invested a lot of time in the recruitment process. Our approach focuses on the thought process of the candidates instead of the right answers. How a candidate approaches a problem statement matters more than giving us the correct answer.

Another challenge was to deal with deep technologies when there was no trained data available. It is quite complex to deal with data especially in India because people mess with the details they provide easily. For instance, the same person will mention the surname in a few places and will miss it else where. This apart, finding the right balance between our strategic goals and clients' requirements, changing behaviors, and new problems were difficult.

Alok Kumar, Co-founder & CTO, Karza Technologies
Alok graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur with a Master's in Technology. He has a strong track record of over 3 years in NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Anomaly Detection. Alok along with Omkar and Gaurav featured in Fortune India 40 Under 40 list for 2021.