This startup aims to fly the banking sector into the heart of fintech revolution

Big dreams, but those are achieved only by those who are willing to jump off the springboard into an empty swimming pool.

As Steve Jobs once famously said, "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes ... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo."

I had my first conversation with Prabhtej and Priyanka back in February, and the seed for their collaboration with Falcon — Priyanka is the CEO and Prabhtej is the COO — was planted many years ago when they used to carpool together to school.

Neither of them is "crazy", a "misfit", a "troublemaker", or a "round peg in a square hole". I am not even suggesting that they are not "fond of rules" and "have no respect for the status quo", but in Priyanka's own words, they did want to challenge the status quo.

They see things differently and have done so since their mid-teens. Prabhtej says he and Priyanka used to ride together to high school — a three-hour round trip. They became best friends and all they would talk about during their car rides was starting a business together.

"...we both had that crazy hunger and fire (that) we need to do something together. And we came up with a plan for an e-commerce company when he was 15 or 16," Priyanka says.

Fifteen or 16 years old. That's quite a young age to be thinking about starting a business. When I was that age, I couldn't see beyond video games, classwork, and, well, girls. It was that age. I'm still obsessed with video games, but this isn't about me.

In Priyanka and Prabhtej's case, though, other, calmer heads prevailed.

"At the time our parents were like, 'You you both have lost it. Can you please go to college? Don't drop out," Priyanka adds.

That's where their paths diverged. They both went to different colleges, in India and abroad, Priyanka attended Yale in the US and went on to found Kite, a business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) Software-as-a-Service (Saas) company, which she says achieved operational profitability in under three years. Priyanka says she's always had an interest, to put it loosely, in FinTech.

She explains it better: "I've been obsessed with FinTech since I was 17. I took a gap year before college because I didn't want to keep going into classrooms. I wanted to take a job and explore the real world. So, I took a gap year and I started to, you know, work with microfinance institutions."

And that's how it started, for her. Around the same age, she wrote an opinion piece for a major Indian business daily on the perils of microfinancing and over-extended borrowers. Her college thesis was on direct-benefit transfers, and she says she even started two financial services-linked non-profits while in college.

"I kept thinking that if I want to make a difference in the world, the way to do that is to pick a field where real change could happen in people's lives. And financial services to me seemed among the most powerful. I felt I couldn't keep doing research ... that I really needed to be in the middle of the action," she says.

And so, Kite was born. Prabhtej, on the other hand, had a more eclectic experience. He started his own beer brand Simba — born of his love for The Lion King — which went on to clock $40 million in revenue. He also sat on the board of BCCI and spearheaded multiple, noteworthy FinTech deals with PNB, RBL, YBL, etc.

He studied finance in college, which to him was "the most exciting subject". He then launched a B2C app called Kite Cash. But he always felt the lending system in India was broken — even if banks wanted to offer small loans to customers, the cost of processing the loan was so high that it was not viable. Prabhtej says Kite Cash began to gain traction and soon touched $20 million in transactions.

And that's when they got noticed. Many companies started approaching them.

"We had spent years on integrating with banks, because without banks, you can't do anything in FinTech in India, right? And most of the other businesses, new FinTech companies wanted to use our API layer or our connections. Banks would tell us, 'Can you please help them? Because we don't have the bandwidth to take them two years to go live," he says.

And therein lies Falcon's genesis. The ornithological theme is no coincidence.

"Priyanka is responsible for naming (Falcon and Kite). because she is obsessed with soaring — going higher, and upward and onward," Prabhtej says.

"All of my Yale classmates were going to Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, but this was like a drug to me. India is such an exciting market to be in, and there are so many problems to solve. So I was like, 'I don't want to stay in the US. I just want to go back. And I want to work in financial services," Priyanka adds.

Now, Falcon has its talons in — forgive the analogy — nearly every financial payment option or instrument in the country: instrument-agnostic cards, UPI and tap-to-pay solutions, full-stack integrated layers that decrease turnaround time, future-proof solutions thanks to its solutions being cloud-native, developer-friendly, and AI-powered, and it also owns RBI licences for better compliance flexibility for its clients.

Falcon says it has the backing of investors like Ali Moiz, Fonder, Stonks; Vivek Gupta, Founder, Licious; Faiz Malayakkara, Director, Emirates Investment Authority; Romeen Seth, Founder, Metasys; James Beshara, Founder, Magic Mind; Shamir Karkal, Founder, Sila Money; Jeremy Solomon, Partner, Nyca, and ex-CFO, Affirm; Devesh Sachdev, MD, Fusion Microfinance; Narendra Rathi of Softbank; Aryaman Vir, Founder, Prohetic Ventures; Rangarajan K, Founder, Five Star Microfinance; Vishal Gupta of TA Associates; Deepak Shahdadpuri, MD, DSG; Yashwanth Hemaraj, Partner, Benhamou Ventures; and Harmanpreeth Singh, Founder, Prath Ventures.

Falcon offers a "pay-as-you-go" transaction and subscription model to help its clients keep upfront costs at bay. Falcon says its approach eliminates the need for costly in-house tech resources and will allow its clients to optimise their budget without compromising quality. The company calls itself a "co-pilot" for its clients' business expansion, The company promises advanced fraud and AML tools, robust KYC and reporting modules, and promises that its clients will be technologically covered for two decades with its future-proof solutions.

1. Industry-first innovations through plug-and-play, pre-programmed modern experiences — ready-to-launch white-label apps, secure SDKs, extensive developer guides, and a robust admin panel.

2. To enable a bank or lender to grow its portfolio rapidly both by offering powerful products to its own loyal customers and to a new base via Falcon’s network of reputed co-brands and partners

3. Program management that eradicates multi-vendor chase for financial institutions, enabling focus on core business while it handles key functions and partner relations.

"We built this entire layer. The banking world is progressing, and we very strongly feel that that's the future — where every company is going to become a FinTech company," Prabhtej adds.

Priyanka sums up what drives Falcon eloquently — how do you create the next generation of financial services? How do you create products for the next 100 million people in India who are going to come into the credit economy?

"The financial services industry is completely being shaken to its core today," she says, adding, "If I push the code sitting in my office today to one of the largest banks using my cloud-native technology, they are going to get that code. They don't even need to talk to us. This is the excitement — it's not only the likes of HDFC and ICICI which are going to you know have all the power. The power is now being distributed to emerging banks — small finance banks, mid-sized banks, NBFCs, tech companies, everyone is becoming a distributor of financial services."