We sat down with Swapnil Mengawade, CEO and Founder of Optimus Fintech, to discuss the company’s journey as it seeks to revolutionise finance operations with AI, data automation, and future-focused innovations.
I have always been fascinated with cutting-edge technology and have been fortunate to lead some groundbreaking projects. Among these are the successful launch of NASA's payload into space and the implementation of the world's first robotic supply chain system for Estee Lauder. In the last decade, my professional focus has been dedicated to the field of retail payments.
During this time, I've collaborated closely with payments, finance, and accounting teams, assisting them in constructing a resilient financial infrastructure. I have witnessed the exponential growth of data systems with disparate file formats, transaction-level intricacies, and sheer transaction volumes that have given rise to significant challenges within payment and finance operations.
My journey of creating, introducing, and expanding retail payment solutions has imparted a profound realization: achieving seamless financial advantages hinges on the presence of a robust backend infrastructure. This realization led to the creation of Optimus, which aims to enable businesses to manage their financial operations with agility, simplicity, and innovation in a secure environment. We aim to empower the finance function to be pivotal in supporting the company's growth journey.
Fin-ops infrastructure for tasks like data aggregation, reconciliation, accounting, and managing financial operations on a large scale is a formidable challenge that every company confronts to varying degrees. Whether you're constructing a robust underlying framework from the ground up or integrating with external service providers, you'll encounter a plethora of intricate decisions that need to be made to facilitate the most efficient means of aggregating, monitoring, reconciling, and accounting transactions across the full life cycle of money movement. This cycle involves intricate services, unique scenarios, and intricate fund movements. When these aspects are not managed effectively, it can have detrimental consequences.
Back-office operations may need help with missing payments, settlement outages, incorrect fees, and financial records failing to reconcile. At the same time, your fin-ops teams are sidetracked, dedicating valuable time and resources to trace the whereabouts of a specific payment. These issues can directly impact the bottom line through revenue leakages, high operational costs, increased dispute rates, etc. We have also seen fin-ops teams manage payment data in unsecured environments like Excel or non-PCI-compliant tools that have led to data security issues. All these challenges can disrupt the progress of your finance and IT roadmap, diverting focus away from creating exceptional user experiences.
While there are common challenges in payment and finance operations that apply across various market segments, there are also variations depending on the specific segment. There is a need for robust financial systems, effective risk management, and ongoing investment in technology and expertise to address them effectively. Additionally, specific market dynamics and competitive landscapes in each segment influence the emphasis placed on certain challenges. Whereas a bank sees regulatory compliance as a top priority, a merchant sees customer payment disputes, chargebacks, cart abandonment, and fraud as its top priority challenges.
Payment operation teams need to implement a unified payment back-office to ensure that all commissions and transactions are reconciled accurately and promptly. Failing to do so can result in various challenges, such as:
At Optimus Fintech, we utilize our extensive knowledge in finance, payments, data science, and AI to tackle a difficult issue – automating back-office and n-way reconciliation processes. This involves collecting, verifying, and standardizing data from various sources, reconciling all transactions, linking a transaction through its life cycle, and delivering precise financial information and analytics.
Optimus Fintech is an enterprise SaaS platform that is PCI-DSS certified. It provides services that cover four critical areas of back-office automation.
Optimus delivers a return on investment for organizations in year one in the form of:
Transaction-level reconciliation and life cycle view serve as the linchpin in ensuring the alignment of individual transactions with their real-world counterparts. This alignment encompasses critical aspects such as timing, direction, and amount, involving multiple parties and services. This precision is of paramount importance in financial products, as it guarantees the prevention of payment mishaps and the assurance that funds are precisely where they should be. Nonetheless, reconciling payments is a multifaceted task that extends beyond mere intuition. It necessitates aggregating payment data from diverse sources, meticulous handling of exception cases, and synchronization with settlement timelines. Constructing efficient, scalable processes capable of adapting to your business's growth trajectory poses a substantial challenge.
Consequently, businesses can shift away from reliance on spreadsheets, static SQL queries, or delicate in-house solutions. Instead, they can harness Optimus' reconciliation platform to automate their financial workflows. We provide the essential infrastructure for payment reconciliation, consolidating disparate data sources into a unified financial data platform. Our platform excels at translating payment transaction data from various sources, such as Payments Service Providers, accounting products, ERPs, banks, and databases into standardized formats. This enables companies to validate and analyze their data across providers swiftly, and promptly detect and resolve anomalies in the process.
Optimus Fintech is gearing up for an exciting year ahead! We have received an overwhelming response from the market and are now focused on deploying our current pipeline and engaging with enterprise merchants, PSPs, gateways, acquirers, banks, and card schemes.
To enhance our efficiency in addressing reconciliation discrepancies, we are implementing an AI/ML-powered recommendation system. This system can quickly analyze patterns and identify inconsistencies, eliminating the need for repetitive manual tasks. It uses advanced data mining and analytics technologies, such as neural networks, to examine datasets, identify connections, and determine the best course of action. By detecting and fixing issues before they impact revenue, organizations can greatly reduce revenue leakages.
Our vision is to become the go-to source for payments, finance, and accounting teams by providing a single source of truth.
Swapnil Mengawade is the Founder and CEO of Optimus Fintech Inc. For a decade, Swapnil has worked in the retail payments arena transforming payment back offices for Fortune 500 companies. In his 15+ years in technology management, Swapnil has pioneered groundbreaking initiatives, from launching payloads into space at NASA to implementing the world's first robotic supply chain system at Estee Lauder. Swapnil holds a B.Eng in mechanical engineering from Drexel University and an M.Eng from Cornell University.
Optimus Fintech is a plug-and-play cloud platform that streamlines payment data management and automates financial workflows through its comprehensive solutions covering data aggregation, reconciliation, exception management, fees, and commission validation, in-depth payment analytics, and reporting.
A PCI-compliant data platform, Optimus is trusted by renowned Fortune 500 companies, processing over 1 billion annual transactions securely, and empowering businesses to effortlessly track, manage, and account for money end-to-end.