Building the Rails: Smarter, Faster, Fraud-Proof Finance, Sabyasachi Goswami, CEO of Perfios Software Solutions

By Puja Sharma

Perfios is reshaping digital banking with AI-driven decisioning, fraud prevention, and real-time financial crime management. As it expands globally and integrates Clari5’s intelligence, the company remains focused on innovation, compliance, and building resilient financial infrastructure.

With the rapid evolution of digital banking and financial technology, how is Perfios serving the diverse needs of financial institutions?

Perfios powers the Indian financial ecosystem through an expansive suite of 75+ products, shaping their end-to-end customer lifecycle from origination and onboarding to decisioning, fraud prevention and monitoring processes at scale and speed.

Our advanced document analysis, identity verification, and liveness checks enable seamless, secure onboarding while mitigating fraud at the application stage. With AI-driven underwriting, alternative data integration, and real-time risk assessment, we help financial institutions expand access to credit while ensuring portfolio quality.

Beyond underwriting and decisioning, Perfios is deeply invested in fraud prevention and financial crime management, which is at the core of our offerings. With deepfake detection, device fingerprinting, mule account identification, and behavioural analytics we power institutions to combat financial crimes across industries. Now, with added real-time monitoring and anti-money laundering solutions, we deliver a comprehensive approach to financial crime management. For insurers, our claims automation and fraud detection solutions deliver significant cost savings by detecting anomalies and fraudulent claims at scale.

By combining speed, accuracy, and security, Perfios enables banks, NBFCs, insurers, and FinTechs to make smarter decisions, enhance customer trust, and scale securely in a rapidly evolving financial landscape.

How can FinTechs effectively utilise AI and alternative data to improve credit decisioning and promote financial inclusion? In what ways is Perfios advancing its decisioning models to balance risk and inclusion?

FinTechs can leverage AI and alternative data to enhance credit decisioning and drive financial inclusion by building beyond traditional credit scoring models, which often exclude vast segments of the population due to insufficient credit history. At Perfios, we are pioneering AI-driven underwriting and decisioning solutions that balance risk assessment with greater accessibility, ensuring that more individuals and businesses gain access to fair and timely credit.

Our AI-powered decision analytics go beyond conventional credit scores by integrating alternative data sources such as transactional behaviour, digital footprints, and cash flow patterns to assess creditworthiness with greater accuracy. This approach allows financial institutions to serve new-to-credit customers and small businesses who demonstrate strong repayment potential.

Perfios’ AI-driven underwriting solutions are transforming risk assessment with generative AI, cross-document analysis, and real-time fraud detection. Our advanced LLM agents and RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) pipelines enhance risk identification, automate compliance checks, and provide deeper financial insights, reducing underwriting biases and ensuring more data-driven, objective decision-making. By embedding credit policies directly into our AI models, we facilitate pre-screening and risk-adjusted lending, ensuring that lenders can expand their reach without compromising portfolio quality.

A key innovation in our AI ecosystem is our two-way dialogue capability, designed to assist underwriters in navigating massive datasets efficiently. Instead of manually sifting through extensive financial records, underwriters can engage with AI to pinpoint relevant insights, analyse key patterns, and interpret complex data in real-time. This not only saves time but also improves decision accuracy, ensuring a more seamless and intelligent underwriting process.

Moreover, our solutions extend across the entire credit lifecycle, from sourcing and onboarding with automated identity verification and fraud detection to post-loan monitoring with AI-led engagement and risk alerts. Through Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) integrations, we enable seamless access to Account Aggregator networks and Open Banking ecosystems, unlocking new avenues for financial institutions to assess borrowers efficiently while maintaining compliance with evolving regulatory frameworks.

As a TechFin, which stands at the intersection of finance and technology, at Perfios, we focus on developing deep technology solutions that empower banks, NBFCs, insurers, and financial institutions to transform their customer lifecycles. We differentiate ourselves from FinTechs, which primarily offer tech-driven financial products and services. As a TechFin, we are the infrastructure enablers, building the rails that empower the ecosystem, not just service providers. By combining AI, alternative data, and regulatory intelligence, we empower financial institutions to make smarter, faster, and more inclusive decisions, ultimately expanding financial access while maintaining robust risk controls.

As global data privacy regulations tighten, how can FinTech companies balance compliance with continuous innovation? How do you ensure data security and regulatory compliance while expanding its data-driven services?

FinTech companies operate in a landscape where data privacy regulations are becoming increasingly stringent, requiring a delicate balance between compliance and innovation. At Perfios, we recognise that regulatory adherence and technological advancement are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary forces driving responsible innovation.

Our products and solutions are secure by design. We ensure data security and compliance while expanding our services by adopting a privacy-first approach that embeds security and regulatory requirements into the very fabric of our products and not as an afterthought. Our architecture is built on zero-trust principles, with stringent encryption, anonymisation, and access controls to protect sensitive financial data. We also align with global regulatory frameworks, including GDPR, India’s DPDP Act, and other regionspecific compliance mandates, ensuring our solutions meet evolving data protection standards.

Continuous innovation at Perfios is driven by AI-powered automation, federated learning, and privacy-enhancing technologies that enable financial institutions to derive insights without compromising data integrity. Our commitment to data minimisation and consent-based data processing ensures that customers retain full control over their information while benefiting from intelligent decisioning and risk management solutions.

As we expand into new markets and adjacent domains, our regulatory intelligence framework ensures proactive compliance, allowing us to navigate complex legal landscapes while maintaining agility in product development. By embedding trust, transparency, and security at every level, Perfios continues to drive innovation in a manner that is both compliant and future-proof.

How is Perfios aligning its growth strategy with product innovation and market diversification as it prepares for its IPO?

An IPO is not the goal we are chasing; when the time comes, it will be a consequential milestone in our growth journey, not the end objective. Our focus remains on reinforcing the foundations that have driven our success: product innovation, customer obsession, operational excellence, and strong governance. By prioritising these, we ensure that when the time for an IPO arrives, it reflects our sustained growth and market leadership.

Our journey so far has helped us build products and solutions that are industry- and geography-agnostic, allowing us to expand seamlessly across markets and geos like MENA SEA and into adjacent domains like e-commerce, payments, securities and investments, legal, and HR tech. This adaptability has fueled our global expansion, particularly across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and other high-growth regions.

At the core of our strategy is continuous innovation, whether it is leveraging AI, automation, and deep analytics to enhance decisioning, verification, fraud prevention, and compliance for financial institutions. By integrating cutting-edge technology, expanding our global footprint, and strengthening our systems, processes and teams, we are building a resilient, scalable and future-ready business, well-positioned for longterm success.

With Perfios acquiring Clari5, how will the integration of Clari5’s real-time AI-driven financial crime management with Perfios’ data analytics capabilities change the ecosystem?

Financial crime is evolving fast, and traditional methods can’t keep up. By integrating Clari5’s real-time financial crime management with Perfios’ expertise in data analytics and decisioning, we’re creating the industry’s most comprehensive fraud and risk mitigation ecosystem. Our solutions empower financial institutions to detect, investigate, and prevent fraud in real-time while ensuring seamless compliance and an optimised customer experience. With scalable, AI-driven fraud prevention across markets, we’re equipping institutions with the precision and agility needed to stay ahead of financial crime.