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BankBazaar CEO Honored at India FinTech Awards 2017

BankBazaar CEO Honored at India FinTech Awards 2017

Adhil Shetty, CEO of BankBazaar, was recognized by the India FinTech Awards 2017 earlier this month. Shetty was named Fintech Leader of the Year at the event, which featured more than 200 attendees, more than 40 speakers, and 20 shortlisted startups from six countries.

“Today, paperless, presenceless transactions are becoming the face of digital finance,” Shetty said. “It is heartening to see our vision of paperless access to all financial products for every Indian being accepted and validated not just by our customers and partners but also by the industry experts at IFTA 2017.”

Sponsored by the India FinTech forum, which seeks to highlight the growing fintech community in India and ensure its role in driving fintech innovation worldwide, the India FinTech Awards is the largest, demo-based, fintech event in India. This year’s presentation included product demonstrations by 20 companies, with the winner earning a spot on stage at the Paris Fintech Forum in January 2018.

BankBazaar CEO Adhil Shetty receiving an award for Fintech Leader of the Year at the India FinTech Awards 2017.

This year’s top honors went to ZestMoney, which was awarded Fintech Startup of the Year, and its CEO and co-founder Lizzie Chapman, who was recognized as Woman Leader in Fintech. Chapman called the Startup of the Year award “recognition of the hard work we have put into building a product and platform that completely changes the way people access credit in this market.”

ZestMoney enables consumers to pay using digital EMI (equated monthly installment), avoiding the need for credit cards and credit scores. Headquartered in Bangalore, India and founded in 2015, the company has raised more than $8 million in funding and includes PayU and Omidyar Network among its investors.

Kickstart Accelerator and YES Fintech won the Accelerator of the Year award.  Also honored at the event was InstaReM, a cross-border remittance and money transfer startup founded in 2014, that participated in our FinovateAsia Startup Showcase earlier this month. InstaReM was recognized as a Fintech Rising Star at IFTA 2017, along with fellow contestants Niki.ai and Zeta. Finovate alum FixNix also participated in the competition.

The good news for BankBazaar comes at the same time the company announced a series of new upgrades to its mobile app. These enhancements include gold, silver, and fuel rate trackers, as well as personalized graphs and visualizations to better see and understand expenses. The app, which has garnered more than one million downloads, will also aggregate a number of features onto a single interface for easier use. “Our mission has been to help consumers access the right financial products and make their financial journey simpler,” Rati Shetty, Chief Product Officer for BankBazaar told DataQuest.

Last month, BankBazaar announced closing a $30 million funding round led by Experian. The two companies have partnered to develop a Credit Score Tracker that gives Indian consumers a secure free credit score as well as educational information on how to use financial planning to improve credit scores.

“There is a natural synergy between the world’s largest information management company and one of the fasted growing fintech companies,” Shetty said. “The funds from this round will be used to further strengthen our position as the leader in secure, paperless access to loans, cards, and mutual funds.” The investment brings BankBazaar’s total funding to $110 million.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Chennai, India, BankBazaar demonstrated its Real Time Credit Processing Platform at FinovateAsia 2012 in Singapore.