Exclusive Interview with Milan Ganatra, Founder and CEO of 1Silverbullet

Business-to-business (B2B), also called B-to-B, is a form of transaction between businesses, such as one involving a manufacturer and wholesaler, or a wholesaler and a retailer. Business-to-business refers to a business that is conducted between companies, rather than between a company and an individual consumer. 1SilverBullet is India's first financial B2B gateway platform for three verticals within the financial services space: investments, insurance, and lending. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Milan Ganatra, Founder and CEO of 1Silverbullet.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

1SilverBullet is India's first financial B2B gateway platform for three verticals within the financial services space: investments, insurance, and lending.

Problem statement: Bringing in transparency and efficiencies in order to eradicate excessive documentation and rectify a disjoint infrastructure through digitisation.

Services that we offer: Offering a more secure workflow in order to declutter the financial services space in India. Leveraging the power of technology such as Blockchain, the platform acts as a single point of contact for investors and financial institutions, linking them in one place via a secure API to acquire and sell investment avenues such as AIFs, MFs, PMS, and similar products.

Currently, we are operational with Investments and Insurance verticals, and by the coming quarter, we hope to activate all three verticals.

The financial service landscape in India is largely dependent on excessive paperwork and has been a maze of consultants, intermediaries, and brokers which makes it very inefficient and cost heavy. To refine the conventional practice of buying and selling financial products, I founded 1Silverbullet. An attempt to digitally streamline the process and reduce human interaction to a minimum. The infrastructure developed by us is a plug-and-play mechanism that connects investors and financial institutes in one place via secured API. Our aim is to offer a more secure workflow in order to declutter the space.

2. Brief us about the Founder/CEO of the company and his contributions to the company and the industry.

My journey in the fintech space began way back in 1999 when I founded my first company, Miles Software. It was a time when the term 'fintech' itself was still finding its place in India's financial lexicon. Over the course of my 19 years as CEO of Miles Software, I worked hard to make wealth management easy with user-friendly tools by leveraging my expertise in technology and finance. After having successfully exited Miles Software in 2018, and selling it to a Nasdaq-listed company, I had already identified my next venture and challenge within the ecosystem that I knew I wanted to transform.

My dual role as a fintech solutions provider and an investor gave me a ringside view of the inadequacies that are prevalent in the chain of communication between providers of financial products and investors. Largely dependent on paperwork, physical signatures and human intervention, these communication processes were evidently broken. This caused more harm than good to both parties involved, and more often than not, it even acted as a deterrent to investors.

Since I was able to identify these pain points right away and with my unique perspective of the financial B2B sector, I wanted to fix them by leveraging my experience in finance and tech ultimately leading me to found and build 1Silverbullet.

3. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?

1Silverbullet is providing its clients with a user-friendly, plug-and-play console to choose and integrate APIs based on their use cases and run a pilot within a sandbox environment. It also has features that monitor the performance of APIs, meter the number of calls made (for billing) and high-quality documentation to help them (investors and financial institutes) understand how they can better use the APIs of 1Silverbullet to their benefit.

In another use case, where the industry doesn't have a platform built yet, 1Silverbullet may build a user interface or SAAS layer and launch as a sub-section of the overall 1Silverbullet platform e.g. portfolio management services' PMS onboarding in the investment track.

4. How has the adoption of APIs in India evolved over the last few years

Technology has raised consumer expectations for curated experiences. We are witnessing Digital Darwinism, consumer needs are evolving at a high pace, and they are demanding more and looking for better experiences. Keeping up with these demands is harder than ever, and the race amongst financial institutions to satisfy them has also grown.

While private and partner APIs have been around for a while, open APIs is the newest innovation that allows businesses to integrate third-party services by onboarding already available APIs, which in turn provide ease and convenience to consumers at multiple touchpoints.

On the other hand, the widespread adoption of digital models owing to the COVID-19 pandemic was a big push. Industries across retail, manufacturing finance, and hospitality shifted the way they did business, pivoting from traditional means to digital ones.  APIs aided businesses in this shift by simplifying connectivity and collaboration.

5. How do you plan to revolutionize the Indian market and what are your plans to tap the market?

Every great revolutionary product or service starts by identifying a problem that exists. In our case, the problem is a disjointed and unevenly digitised chain of communication between financial product manufacturers, distributors, and investors. With 1Silverbullet, we aim to address them by digitising as well as democratising the entire workflow. To simplify, my long-term vision is to create a network similar to a UPI or a VISA for investments and insurance products.

We have 40+ PMSes, and in the next few months, we plan to onboard 3X the number of PMSes that we currently have. That nearly constitutes 30% of the key PMS suppliers in the country. We are currently signing at least 1 large enterprise client per day. The trust and response that we have received have been overwhelming, and all new-age PMSes have chosen to be with us since we began operations in March 2021. In terms of the market, we don't want to restrict ourselves with geographies so we shall be looking to expand to other Asian countries as well.

6. What is the edge your company has over other players in the industry?

Our main differentiator is that we provide new-age financial companies with a ready-made, digitally-enabled back-end, i.e. connectivity at a low cost. In addition, we bear the burden of ongoing maintenance. This allows them to focus on managing their front-end and core strength offering rather than worrying about integrating the back-end, reducing their time to market by half.

We have a mix of domain expertise, technology systems, and a wealth of experience in terms of our senior leadership team. We have brought together a young and energetic team who are enthusiastic to work on new ideas and innovate. And to back them, we have a team of senior industry experts who can become guides and mentors. Overall, it is a good blend of the energy of youth and wisdom of experience. A goal-oriented team with the right attitude, in my opinion, offers us an advantage in the industry.

7. What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

While we are currently live with the investment gateway, and Insurance vertical being in an advanced beta stage our immediate plan is to go live with at least 14 life insurers and 10-12 health insurers as well as to add corporate fixed deposits under the investment gateway.

Eventually, We would be introducing more products across a whole gamut of verticals. Also, as we expand our clientele, we are hoping to grow in terms of employee size and have at least a 200-member team.

8. What is your Leadership Mantra?

My leadership mantra is "People are a company's true capital" – Treat them as valuable resources and not as expendable bodies, even their smallest achievement should be appreciated.