KnowledgeNile Interview: Discussing AI and FinTech to Fix Payment Delays

Discussing AI and FinTech to Fix Payment Delays Ft. Balaji Sridharan, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of KredosAi

ExtraMile by KnowledgeNile is your gateway to the future of tech alongside experts across industries. In each episode, we discuss the latest innovations, marketing strategies, tech practices, and more. 

In this session, we are excited to introduce Balaji Sridharan, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of KredosAI, a frontrunner in fintech addressing customers' late payments. The firm empowers enterprises by solidifying their relationships with their late-paying customers. It amalgamates behavioral economics with human-centered AI while enabling partners to offer personalized experiences to their customers.

With KredosAI, Sridharan aims to back enterprises with AI-powered solutions to address the challenge of late payments. Strategic thinking and strong leadership are the core components that our guests reflected while establishing KredosAi.

Explore Sridharan's journey in different domains and understand how KredosAI is empowering businesses with advanced data and AI implementation.

Welcome, Balaji; it's a pleasure to have you with us today!

You reflect your expertise in diverse domains, including strategic planning, product development, digital marketing, and business development. How have different roles and responsibilities allowed you to attain such vast skill sets?

Ans. I started my career as an engineer working on large enterprise implementations of supply chain management software. This allowed me to get a good understanding of not only the customer-facing aspects of enterprise software implementation, but also the technical aspects of how best to (and sometimes how not to) deploy software at scale for large enterprises.

Later, I became a management consultant at McKinsey. This helped me home in on how best to manage relationships with senior executives at large corporations – and effectively engage them on important strategic priorities.

Then, I put these skills into practice at T-Mobile where I led the strategy group and went on to establish a new Internet of Things business unit. These experiences helped me understand what it takes to operationally run functions from sales and marketing to product at a large company.

My current role at KredosAi builds upon these past experiences – implementing AI-driven enterprise SaaS solutions for large enterprises to solve a very important problem – “how do I communicate effectively with customers that have gone late on payments and get them to act?”

KredosAI is a brilliant fintech firm that empowers businesses with their financial functionalities. What inspired you to establish this company, or which industry gaps did you intend to fulfil with KredosAI?

Ans. The idea was an organic evolution of what we observed when working within large enterprises as well as an understanding of some of the latest advances in technology (AI, rich communications services, etc.) and figuring out a way to bring them together to solve a critical pain point for large enterprises with a sizeable consumer base – how can companies effectively communicate to customers that have gone late on payments?

Having worked at T-Mobile when they rebuilt their brand to take them from being ranked as the last wireless carrier in the US market to the best, their brand strategy centered around transparent and effective communications to the consumer base. We realized how important effective communication can be for a brand that serves millions of consumers. That’s why it’s always surprising to see brands that do a great job of communication drop the ball when it comes to late payments. KredosAi was built to implement a practical use of AI and experimentation to help large enterprises communicate effectively to a consumer base that has gone late on payments.

According to you, which financial challenges do companies usually encounter at present, and how do they overcome them?

Ans. With the global economy starting to transition at this point, one of the most important problems that large enterprises face is how to deal with late payments, especially companies that have a sizable consumer base. The problem is more nuanced when you need an effective way to communicate to this segment to drive action.

In this age of digital noise, communicating effectively to generate action is critical. It is also important to do so in a manner that doesn’t alienate the audience – as that can drive negative consequences in the form of subscriber churn or attrition.

Branding for B2B firms is different from B2C and D2C models. What strategies do you adopt for KredosAi's branding purposes?

Ans. In general, for a B2B company branding is less about flash and more about trust and differentiation. The proof is in the pudding, and for us it is all about keeping customers happy both in terms of service as well as outcomes.

The success of B2B brands is almost always determined by how satisfied and happy a customer is. Even today, as we talk to some of our customers and hear how mistreated they are by their suppliers, it baffles me to think about how some companies haven’t yet figured out this basic concept – keep customers happy and satisfied and the rest will follow. We have a saying at KredosAi: we want to be the supplier that we wished we had when we were in our customers’ shoes. That becomes even more important in the current times.

Of course, we use other branding strategies such as thought leadership and awareness that are directly linked to our mission and values. But at the end of the day, I want to highlight how important it is to keep your customers happy! This is one of the learnings from my Un-carrier days at T-Mobile.

What role does AI play in transforming financial activities? Does AI impose major data privacy and security concerns while integrated in finance?

Ans. AI is a broad topic, and there are several areas where it can help – risk management and personalization are a couple that we are focused on. Most people immediately gravitate towards genAI when the word AI is mentioned these days. There are also other approaches and techniques that are equally important,​​ that don’t get talked about much. For example, reinforcement learning, which is a form of machine learning, can be a powerful tool in situations where we need to experiment with thousands of potential approaches simultaneously and quickly figure out what works best in which situations.

It is absolutely essential for us to protect the privacy and data of our customers – that is table stakes. Some of the techniques we employ allow us to do that AND bring some of the latest advances in technology and AI to our customers. In addition, we have adopted a security first approach as a company that allows us to appropriately protect any data we use.

What is auto financing? How does it help streamline the financial exchange of auto lenders and borrowers?

Ans. Auto financing is simply the concept of lending money to finance a vehicle. There is a lot of similarity between that world and the Telco world that I come from. Telcos or wireless carriers finance a lot of phones (which can cost as much as $1000 today). In the auto financing world, you finance smaller quantities of a larger asset (car). The consumer characteristics of auto lending consumers and phone consumers have a lot of similarities in terms of frequency of payments, overall lifetime value etc.

What is the significance of data in building and managing successful startups? How to gather actionable and valuable data that actually can be integrated for organizational benefits?

Ans. Data is a strategic asset for any company. It informs actions, and analyzing the data allows us to take actions that have specific outcomes. It might sound mechanical, but it is surprising how basic concepts of using data to make decisions are often forgotten when building a company. For example, when a company is deciding to build a feature into a product, the basic question of the magnitude of benefit that feature will drive can be one of the useful prioritization mechanisms. Understanding the unit economics of CAC, LTV etc. can also be particularly helpful. In addition, data can also help improve operational efficiency. Measurement and tracking are key to monitoring progress.  ​     ​

Entrepreneurship is full of challenges. How can appropriate planning and a strategic approach be beneficial in this regard?

Ans. I like skiing, and I like to think of running a startup as similar to that. When the snow is good and you are skiing in two feet of fresh powder, look ahead and enjoy the turns. But when navigating a rock field and ice, look right in front of you to make sure you don’t fall.

The ability to shift between strategic priorities and tactical things that need to be done is very important—especially in the startup world. Most importantly, having the right team in place is critical. Challenges are going to be there, and the difference between success and failure is how you deal with them.

This article can also be viewed on KnowledgeNile's website.