Individual KYC (know your customer) has gone digital in the past decade. Banks and lending institutions can verify an individual borrower’s identity in minutes. Still, corporate KYC remains an untidy business of documents, databases, emails and human checks—even as companies become more important customers of banks, lenders, fintechs and payment firms. That gap is what Ebitaus, a Chennai-based fintech founded by Venkatesh Kap, is trying to address. Its proposition: corporate KYC should be a continuing process, not a one-off verification exercise.Venkatesh has spent two decades on both sides of corporate lending, dealing with corporate customers at a leading private bank and later managing several hundred crores of bad loans at an NBFC. His experience with stressed borrowers led him to question whether the problem was simply bad lending. “It was not just loans. It was monitoring, KYC, execution, revaluation and due diligence. Something was missing in the whole process,” he says. India’s lending ecosystem has since become much better at dealing with bad loans. Risk controls have tightened, reporting has improved, and lenders have invested heavily in tech. Yet corporate KYC, Venkatesh argues, remains scattered across people, databases and internal systems.The weakness is evident in consortium lending, where a borrower may have several banks, directors and authorised signatories. A change in a company’s ownership, management or circumstances may not immediately trigger an alert across lenders. “The systems are there, but they are all in silos,” he says. Knowing a firm is more complicated than knowing a person. A lender must establish not merely that a business exists, but who owns, controls it, who its directors and authorised signatories are, who ultimately benefits from it, what it does and what risks surround it. Complex corporate structures make that task harder, while repeated checks add cost and delay.“We are not a verification entity, but a corporate KYC platform,” says Venkatesh. Its software connects databases and APIs and turns verification results into a workflow for banks and regulated financial institutions. The idea is to create a persistent corporate identity that can be updated and acted upon, rather than a collection of documents checked whenever a new transaction requires it.The strategy is to build a bank-agnostic platform rather than customise software for individual lenders. Target customers are private sector banks, new-generation banks, and NBFCs, among others. The three-year-old startup says its platform is deployed with two banks, while more than half a dozen other lending institutions are discussing deployment. “Bank onboarding can take a few months, involving security checks, tech integration, customisation and testing,” says Venkatesh.The company has also worked on remote identity verification and re-KYC. In a proof-of-concept for a UAE bank, its system authenticated an Emirates ID, conducted facial verification and liveness checks, and enabled issuance of a virtual card without a branch visit. The potential savings are therefore less about eliminating paperwork than reducing the human effort required to reconcile information. Ebitaus says its platform can bring the process down to around 30 minutes in appropriate cases and reduce the cost from roughly `2,400 to `240 per application.The company has a 17-member core team, mostly technologists, has developed much of its product in-house and has obtained ISO certification. Co-founder Srinath provides technology expertise alongside Venkatesh’s banking experience.Ebitaus was initially funded largely by Venkatesh himself. Although it says external capital is not immediately necessary, it hopes to raise $4-5 million from PE investors next year. Ebitaus estimates roughly three crore corporate KYC transactions take place in India each year across MSMEs, mid-sized firms and large businesses. Much of the volume comes from proprietorships, partnerships, LLPs and private limited companies. Large firms account for fewer transactions but are harder to process because they typically have more directors, signatories and banking relationships.For now, it aims to handle 10,000 corporate KYC transactions a month within two years, which it estimates would be about 4-5% of its potential market. Its larger bet is corporate KYC will eventually become more than a compliance chore. Ebitaus wants to build a digital banking platform focused exclusively on businesses, with KYC as the entry point.
