Founded by Siddhartha, a financial services industry veteran with experience in managing Deutsche Bank and State Street operations, and Sanjay Nishank, an IIM Bangalore alumnus with technology experience in financial services in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, Intain’s teams in India and the U.S. combine rich experience in structured finance from the likes of Deutsche Bank, Moody’s and BNY Mellon.
Intain has built its success on being able to address many of the inherent challenges of administering and tracking complex financial loan agreements. The company has been able to accurately integrate and automate financial transactions into a series of processes on the blockchain that is part of Intain’s platform, allowing for real-time understanding of all elements of the asset to date.
"An India-based development team deepens our moat. Building an industry platform is more than a couple of exceptionally bright engineers working together to innovate. A team has to come together with one goal and remain focused,” said Sanjay Nishank, Co-founder and COO of Intain. “Intain outlasted most of our global competition because we remained dedicated and focused on our mission. At the beginning of the pandemic when we had sadly reduced our sales and marketing expenses, we maintained a team of fifteen developers to work on product development.”
When considering how the platform could aid financial institutions and markets, one need only consider the 2007-2008 global financial crisis depicted in the movie The Big Short. When inexpensive credit and poor lending practices fueled a housing bubble, with loans turned into collateralised assets and securities by Wall Street banks and the collapse happened, no one knew how widespread the losses were. An automated blockchain platform that tracks these transactions could have identified problems and potential losses much earlier in the chain.
“For Indian enterprise technology startups in areas like blockchain or artificial intelligence, there is always a temptation to do project work for easy money in the short-term. The lure of doing ICO projects in 2018, STO in 2019, NFTs in 2021 was not easy to resist but we stayed clear and focused on Intain’s goal,” said Siddhartha, Founder and CEO of Intain. “The question we asked ourselves was if blockchain technology existed in 2005, how it could have been used to, if not prevent, at least provide clear and early warning signs to mitigate the global financial crisis.”
Intain is now using its position to connect lenders with investors in the Decentralised Finance (DeFi) space where lending institutions can raise capital by tokenising their loan pools. For investors, this creates a primary market for the risk-priced structured credit instruments that are issued on the blockchain, and a secondary market providing liquidity as they can be traded in small fractions and settle in real-time on blockchain itself. For lending institutions, it provides access to a continuous flow of low-cost capital with reward for transparency.
The private structured credit market in the advanced economies will benefit from the efficiencies, better price discovery and a new set of investors, as a minimum viable deal size of $100 million to $200 million keeps them out of the public asset-backed securities (ABS) market.
In emerging economies, central banks and governments are looking for new ways to finance credit growth. DeFi can play a critical role in this, both within larger countries like India as well as to link credit markets with regional capital market hubs like Singapore.
To learn more about Intain, please visit www.intainft.com.
