Rewind 2022: Decentro Growth Edition

Ahead of the curve. 

That’s what we at Decentro have been known for—being ahead of the curve in API banking since July 2020.

Developing solutions. 

Forging partnerships. 

Growing our API volumes. 

Winning customer love. 

Bagging investments. 

Expanding across geographies. 

Building solutions that cater to those geographies. 

Through the two years of our inception, the two constants across the journey have been growth and learning. We have built up to a point where we now look back to the iterations that went into furnishing the numbers we are today. 

Not to toot our horns, but Decentro grew by 30X in API transactions and 3X in live customers in the last 12 months alone. 

With consistency being the key to our scalability, today we bring you a breakdown of our growth journey over the year that was 2022.

Identifying the networks 

While the first year of the growth of Decentro heavily depended on the primary network that the founding team had the privilege of tapping into, the year 2022 was about leveraging great word of mouth, and our brand that is being built in the market. 

With a conscious effort to establish a more profound presence across our categories of customers, the team’s focus lay in leveraging the successful outcomes for our existing customer base. The fact that there is a solution in the market now that takes away their banking woes, and makes it 10X faster to go live at a 90% reduced Capex + Opex with an exponential reduction in the efforts involved, became our elevator pitch.  

Having already set the stage with the expectation that what we are building is ultimately solving one of the biggest & long-standing problems in the world of banking & financial services, we cascaded to 2nd-degree connections via our early adopters.

These 2nd-degree connections primarily came from 

1. Existing customers: Leveraging the circle of trust that we have built in the two years of our inception   
2. Focused connections: The ever so daunting but mostly rewarding networking at events and festivals.

On the one hand, word of mouth played an essential role in expanding our customer base; attending the right conferences and conclaves allowed us to get the soft introductions in with our marquee customers. 

Sticking to our Ideal Customer Persona allowed us to create a template to identify and scope out relevant stakeholders in such events. This was instrumental in contributing to an exhaustive pipeline for the year. We were lucky enough to stumble upon networks that kept on giving in terms of leads or just potential customer base, and these were the networks that we leveraged across the year.

Penetrating the market via Relevancy

While identifying the right network is your one foot in the market, your adoption depends on the relevancy of your solution suite. 

Decentro’s journey in the market in terms of penetration was two-fold. The initial ethos of the organization lay in creating the awareness that the existing product infrastructure while setting up, might not be sufficient to accommodate most of the banking and finance needs. However, today the product pipeline has reached a point where the API stack at Decentro caters to most, if not all, payments and banking needs. 

Riding on the back of compliance, interoperability, and uniformity of the API format, our products have been through multiple litmus tests in this dynamic world of banking. With each compliance change and guidelines release, the team took it upon themselves to ensure the solution remains secure, compliant, and customer-informed. 

The extra mile of customer satisfaction becomes the next crucial point of Decentro’s Growth Journey. 

The advent of Pro(duct)-Cus(tomer) Model 

Our founding team has always prided itself in positioning Decentro as a product-focused organization. A product built by keeping empathy towards our customers (companies) in mind. 

The offerings aim to make the customer’s lives easy, even if that warrants the daunting task of handling multiple tedious banking infrastructure integrations, at a competitive speed in terms of execution.

As a customer, your journey with Decentro starts when you click on that sign-up button. Having shifted our focus to dedicated support groups and executives for customer onboarding allowed Decentro to bring a superior user experience. From making sure users have a smooth onboarding to taking care of all the upcoming fixes, underlying iterations, and automatic updates without breaking any flow at any point in time, each cog in the wheel that is Decentro is building towards the collective goal of a superior user experience. 

The fact that Decentro as a solution is bankable allowed us to build a mutual trust environment on the back of transparency and accountability. 

When building a product company, the speed of development is highly critical. However, when building an underlying fintech infrastructure product, quality also plays a vital role. Balancing the two together measuredly can create a great customer experience. This elevated customer experience is something that Decentro is extremely proud of having conquered as a team, time and time again.

The Infrastructure Support

Being a reliable payments layer for 300+ clients means that Decentro’s server infrastructure has to be resilient and highly well-constructed. It’s all part of carrying the torch of quality and speed from the product team and executing it from the engineering perspective. 

This year consisted of numerous optimizations and rearchitecting to manage the scale without breaking a sweat.

 “As our client’s scale, so shall we” was the mantra for the year. 

Team Decentro

We introduced detailed indexing, an auto-scalable infrastructure, and new security upgrades to have our clients sleep calmly at night, knowing that with Decentro, transactions will continue flowing at the highest throughput and lowest turnaround time.

The Business Growth Engine

The robust infrastructure and a solid product pipeline fed into a loyal and ever-expanding customer base. The ethos that ran across the Sales and Business team drew its leaf from a handbook with the following chapters  

1. Consultative Approach – We act as pseudo-consultants to our customers as we operate in a highly regulatory space. We end up meeting our customers in person & understanding their pain points. Sometimes, it’s just the relationship that differentiates us from the competition. These interactions also help us find product-level gaps in the market
2. Customer references – It’s easier for companies to integrate our platform when they see live examples of the APIs from live customers.
3. Newer products and features – We were lucky to find customers willing to give us constant feedback so we could rapidly iterate on product enhancements & bugs.
4. Stronger support – As we grew, we had to ramp up our operations & customer success team to maintain the service levels early customers enjoyed
5. Constant cold reach outs – Our team, including founders doesn’t shy from reaching out to relevant teams of potential companies
6. Saying No to new features –  The googly of the lot. We keep getting a lot of product requests & we don’t necessarily accept all of those. As a company, we’re good at certain things & don’t want to dilute our proposition.

These common sense-driven decisions today have put us in a spot where our customer base has increased by 3X over the year. Sometimes the mantra that works can be as straightforward as “Keep it simple, silly”.

The Marketing Mantra 

We can be brave enough to claim that the first year of the marketing foundation laid by the Decentro, has been bearing fruits in the form of brand recognition. With the clarity of the marketing engine being crystal clear from the get-go, the efforts in converting organic leads trickled down the route of 

1. Consistency: The recall value with the brand this year-round remained at an all-time high, with the communication channels being open via social media posting all 5 days a week and a bi-monthly newsletter.
2. Optimization: Targetted blogs, structured around keywords focused on the payments and banking ecosystem, allowed us to laser focus our marketing efforts towards quality and an appropriate target audience. 
3. Transparency when it comes to our efforts (case in point, this blog)

With the marketing effort being divided between content, social media, and email marketing, and the consistency across the three channels, the following numbers have been making the rounds in the Dcentro’s Marketing corridors.

1. Website Traffic 

With time, our overall traffic, which was once dominated by the Direct Source, due to word-of-mouth marketing, started bringing traction from Organic sources as well. In pure number play, there was a 109% increase in overall growth percentage, a number that was built via continued efforts.

2.  The SEO Saga 

There was a conscious effort to drive content while keeping our SEO health in mind. A targeted approach towards keywords, being furnished as a result of SEO audits each month, allowed us to witness pretty incredible results in terms of pure SEO Growth Percentage sitting at a whopping 198%.

3. Social media impression 

Consistency being the operative term when it came to social media posting allowed us to grow our follower base in multiple of 100s week over week.

Each of these laterals condenses to a single focus effort across the year to make the offerings competitive and get those offerings to the masses.

To put things into perspective, in just a matter of two years, our KYC stack has been churning solid numbers.

With over 400+ Identity validations, 250+ Image recognitions, and 300+ Repository fetches happening via Decentro’s KYC stack per hour, we’re more than equipped to enable your verification and validation journey. 

With the resolve of making Fintech Great Again, we are determined to enter 2023 with the focus of scaling our growth journey from 1- 10 in terms of our offerings, as we as an organization are just getting started!  

Be it enabling businesses with collections capabilities, simplifying payments with UPI for gig platforms, helping neobanks to provide a seamless experience to their customers, or ensuring thorough background checks for businesses via KYC & CKYC!

The road ahead in 2023 sure is exciting!

Are you curious to know more about our offerings or our product journey in general? Don’t worry, we don’t gatekeep information. Drop us a line at hello@decentro.tech

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