Altair, the global solution provider has nearly Rs 500 crore worth revenue exposure in Indian market currently and has been growing steadily, close to 20% growth. India is the single largest location for Altair, in terms of employees, with over 25% of the employees based in the country. The company has some aggressive growth projection and is looking to latch on to new technology and capitalise on potentia opportunity, especially in the Indian banking and finance space.
Speaking exclusively to Financial Express Online, Dylan Tancil – Global Director, BFSI, Altair and Sudhir Padaki – APAC Director, Altair shared how they expect the BFSI business for the company to share trajectory similar to their other endeavours, especially in terms of digital transformation.
Tancil outlined how “Altair has played a role globally with banks in the space of digital transformation. There is so much data being generated with these billions of digital transactions (91 billion digital transactions as per NPCI in 2022-2023) that every financial company wants to leverage and get valuable insights out of it. Our Data-Analytics and AI solutions are made to help these companies build a data-driven future to drive efficiencies, better customer experience and reduce risk. So there’s a lot of opportunity in the work that we do in any region of the world for us to really accelerate with our partners in India.”
Altair is focussing on helping banks, lending institutions and fintechs with data-driven lending across India. Currently in India, about 63% of India’s adult population is credit unserved and another 19% is underserved. This is as per a TransUnion study. “Organizations are still struggling with making accurate credit decisions determining the creditworthiness of a customer. There is a critical need to address these demands by deploying a faster data-driven approach. Altair is bringing the power of AI to help organizations make credit decisions, a journey of inclusion rather than exclusion, by offering data-driven confident and profitable lending with use cases across the lending lifecycle,” point out Tancil.
“Another thing that’s exciting about our BFSI in India is that you know your national Stock Exchange has one of the largest trading volumes in the world and we work with exchanges and trading firms all over the place for visualizing electronic trading data,” added Tancil.
But that said, there are challenges too. Tancil explained that “the challenges that we see are typical across all banking in terms of regulatory. We still face the traditional due diligence that any bank would do, whether it’s in India or otherwise on who offer is it the vendor and is our technology safe to use with your customer data? But when I compare our partners in India to other places, we operate like the United States, I find that they’re very open to new technologies.”
In fact, Altair is now working with large banks in India “catering to a total of 72+ million customers.” Tancil highlighted how they typically hear concerns regarding regulatory compliance, lack of data-science skills, compatibility, and interoperability with legacy systems and their “ vision has always been to solve these issues with our comprehensive solutions and that is reflected in our recent acquisitions.”
In many of these endeavours, Altair is taking the inorganic route to both tap large revenue potential and also enhance reach. Tancil listed out some of the company’s recent acquisitions to further articulate the point, “Our acquisition of DataWatch has an incredibly advanced analytics and AI tool that develops explainable AI models to ensure tighter compliance in line with the recent RBI guidelines on digital lending. Second is the lack of data-science talent. Our vision has always been to democratize and modernize data science in organisations to facilitate innovation and sustainability. Our acquisition of RapidMiner allows companies to ensure enterprise-wide AI adoption. Our third acquisition of World Programming fits well with the point on legacy systems(prevalent in India) with which we address the widespread and uncomfortable trend of technical debt. One key technology is the ability to leverage the SAS language and open-source frameworks in a single platform.”
Traditionally Altair has played in the simulation of high performance computing space and through the series of acquisitions over the last couple of years, the company has added data analytics and its sort of living at the best space that the convergence of all three practices, the management revealed.
Sudhir Padaki added that, “coming to revenue here we make about Rs 500 crores today. Looking at the accounts that we have today, we have a very aggressive growth plan for the country, especially not just from the revenue perspective. Already a significant part for product development happens in India. We plan to obviously scale that up quite significantly because of the abundance of talent.”
The management believes that with the right skills for developing data science, India is a very strategic market for them and justifies Altair’s aggressive expansion plans for the country.