Interview with Sailesh Savani, Founder and CEO of CompuLynx

What is your new focus for the company?

We continue to be in the retail technology space, but our bigger focus is how we can build technology for a better tomorrow that helps all the stakeholders. How can we help the retail businesses that use our software to build a better tomorrow for their organization, their employees, their customers, and for their communities?

How are you practically doing this for your customers?

Until now, we have only been selling software. Now, we are able to provide software at a much lower entry level cost because we are on the Cloud. The customer does not have to buy software upfront, expensive hardware or licenses, and they are on a pay as you go basis. Now, they are able to automate their businesses.

What do you propose for the digital identity platform?

Digital identity is one area where we are making a lot of investments. To add onto that, we are looking at investments in Blockchain as well as IoT platforms. There is a lot of interest in agriculture, NGOs, and retail for Blockchain.

Digital identity is a horizontal for us that caters to every vertical. We work with banks, NGOs, the government, educational institutes. Digital identity encompasses all the different types of biometrics technology available in the market including face, voice, fingerprint, iris. We are deploying this in different environments. For banks, we are using eKYC so they are now able to identify their customers better. Frauds that are related to identity theft are now being eliminated by bringing eKYC with biometrics into the banking systems. Whenever I want to withdraw money as a customer from an ATM or at the banking hall, I produce my biometric, identify myself, and the bank will give the money. Going forward, when doing any mobile banking transaction, you can identity yourself using your cellphone, voice, face, or iris and authenticate any transaction you are doing with the bank. We work with NGOs in very harsh environments where they are dispensing benefits to marginalized communities, internally displaced peoples, refugees, etc. The benefits were not reaching the right beneficiaries. With our technology platform, there is complete accountability and visibility in the value chain to make sure the right beneficiaries received what they should receive.

What is your international reach?

We now have over 400 customers in 37 countries across the globe.

What are the solutions that you sell to these customers?

Retail is a large base we have across the globe. The second is NGO. We started working with Kenyan banks who have now taken us across the borders. They have operations in five to seven countries across East Africa.

You have always been interested in investing in innovation. What have you done recently?

We are continuing to add nuances to our existing products. We have taken our entire product portfolio to the Cloud in moving with the industry. We are currently doing a lot of work in the biometrics space. We want to make biometrics affordable to organizations. There is also some very niche product development happening right now.

What is one of your recent success stories?

We are working with one of the largest commercial banks in East Africa on an eKYC platform where we are deploying our entire biometric platform integrated with their banking solution to make sure that they are able to identify their banking customers using biometrics. There are about 3 million customers on the platform now. We did a similar project a few years back where we worked with the largest retail bank in East Africa and we were able to deploy our solution for over 10 million customers there.

What is your vision for the company in the medium term, two to three years’ time? What do you want the company to become?

We want to be among the top five IT companies in Africa. We want to go into other African countries where we do not yet have reach. We have accepted a reasonable challenge for ourselves to be a 50-million-dollar company by 2022. It seems doable given the circumstances we are in, but it is not going to be easy.

Are you looking for investors or partnerships?

We are not looking for money. We are looking for a strategic investor who will help us grow our markets and grow our product offering and bring some new knowledge in the business to us that we do not have today. We do not know what we do not know. There is cheap and expensive money available. However, we would look for an investor not to get money, but to get market reach, expertise, and expansion.

Are you looking in any particular area such as technology?

Digital identity is one area where we are making a lot of investments. To add onto that, we are looking at investments in Blockchain as well as IoT platforms. There is a lot of interest in agriculture, NGOs, and retail for Blockchain. We are already in partnerships with organizations and we have set up joint ventures for providing Blockchain technology in this part of the world. We are also talking to our prospective European partner to offer IoT in this region.

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