Slow-cook to perfection: Perfios’ recipe for successful mergers

Fintech firm Perfios’ CEO Sabyasachi Goswami likens a successful merger to making kali daal, a dish that’s slow-cooked, after soaking lentils overnight, so that it develops its signature smooth texture and flavour.

“Before a delicious dish is served, it takes time to cook and develop its full flavour. We all love kali daal, but the best one is slow-cooked overnight and allowed to rest,” says Goswami.

The dish is all about patience and perfection. And that is exactly how Goswami hopes to integrate the firm’s recent acquisitions, Clari5 and CreditNirvana, into the Perfios umbrella—slowly and steadily, giving them enough space and time for innovation and assimilation.

Perfios helps large banks and financial institutions automate and manage the various processes connected with digital lending, payments, and asset management. It also helps lenders connect with loan origination services to disburse loans faster than via manual connections.

The fintech firm, which became a unicorn a year ago, has been consistently acquiring companies that align with its long-term vision of becoming the “operating system” of the BFSI (banking, financial services, and insurance) industry.

The company’s first acquisition was Kraza Technologies, an identity verification platform, in February 2022. A year later, it acquired financial behaviour analytics startup Fego.Ai. 

In the last couple of months, Perfios has acquired Bengaluru-based startups Clari5 and CreditNirvana. With these acquisitions, the firm aims to bolster its capabilities in risk management, debt collection, and fraud prevention.

What the acquisitions bring to the table

Founded by Rivi Varghese, Clari5 is an enterprise fraud management system that monitors, in real time, the entire customer journey within financial institutions.

The company claims to process over 1 billion accounts and handle over 6 billion transactions annually. With over 45 integrations globally, Clari5 primarily works with major financial institutions in over 20 countries. 

Clari5 monitors transactions across all channels of financial institutions to prevent fraud and detect mule accounts and suspicious activity patterns. (A mule account is a bank account used by criminals to launder illicit funds.)

“We are part of every decision the bank makes,” points out Varghese. 

Co-founded by Raj MKK, Credit Nirvana optimises debt collections for financial institutions through AI and automation. The company has assets under management worth $14 billion and processes over 30 million records daily in India. It claims to have reduced collection costs by about 30%, bounce rates by 50%, and non-performing assets by 65%.

Credit Nirvana’s platform analyses both structured financial data and unstructured data to predict a borrower’s likelihood of repayment.

“For a borrower, the decision on whether he will pay or not depends upon two factors: his ability to pay and his willingness to pay,” explains Raj.

“The ability to pay can be identified through financial data. How do we analyse the willingness to pay? That’s where you need to analyse not just the structured data, you also need to analyse the unstructured (data).”

CreditNirvana integrates unstructured data, such as lender-borrower conversations, with financial metrics like credit scores and repayment history to identify the best communication channels for each customer and predict potential delinquencies before they occur.

Credit Nirvana’s platform features predictive capabilities to identify accounts that could become delinquent in the future. “Very large number of borrowers may not be delinquent now, but they have a propensity to be so, maybe in the next month or so,” says Raj.

Also Read

Perfios profit jumps multifold in FY24

Integrating the acquisitions

Clari5 and CreditNirvana, with approximately 200 and 100 employees respectively, will become wholly-owned subsidiaries of Perfios, which currently has around 1,500 employees. Both subsidiaries will continue to operate independently.

The challenge before Perfios is to bring the technologies of Credit Nirvana and Clari5 under the Perfios umbrella without disrupting existing operations.

Integrating AI-driven automation and shared data intelligence creates a unified, data-driven ecosystem that enables financial institutions to mitigate risks, improve collections, and optimise customer lifecycle management.

“By combining these two companies, we empower banks to build a higher-quality loan book and, where issues arise, we enable them to recover funds faster and more efficiently,” says Goswami.

Perfios is working on integrating Clari5’s enterprise fraud management system into every stage of the financial transaction lifecycle, ensuring fraud detection is not limited to onboarding but extends throughout a customer’s financial journey.

Early conversations with banks and financial institutions are helping shape the combined offering, and some product integrations have already begun.

Meanwhile, CreditNirvana’s AI-driven debt collection platform will be layered into Perfios' lending and credit analytics ecosystem to improve efficiency in collections.

“Every decision a financial institution makes—whether it’s processing a payment, approving a loan, or monitoring high-value transactions—should be informed by real-time risk intelligence. That’s the power of bringing Clari5 and Perfios together,” Goswami elaborates.

BFSI and beyond

Going forward, Perfios is looking for opportunities that align with its vision of becoming the BFSI "operating system."

"If a company’s technology and culture fit with ours, we are open to future acquisitions,” says Goswami.

While BFSI will remain its core focus, Perfios sees its fraud and debt management solutions going beyond this sector. Goswami believes sectors such as healthcare, commerce, and agriculture could benefit from risk intelligence and collection optimisation technologies.