'Blockchain talent demand is growing by 40% in each quarter in India'

Belgium-based SettleMint that has recently announced the launch of its India operations and having had 35+ implementations of blockchain solutions across sectors, including Indonesian elections is one of the fastest growing blockchain companies. Terming it as a hotbed of blockchain technology activity, Matthew Van Niekerk, CEO - SettleMint and Shazad Fatmi, CEO, SettleMint India tells VARINDIA about the areas in which they see the scope of blockchain in the India market besides sharing the advantages that this technology can offer to its customers -

Who is the Promoter/Founder of the company? What is the year of inception?

Two founders, Matthew Van Niekerk (CEO) and Roderik van der Veer (CTO) founded SettleMint 2016.

What has been the concept behind the inception of your company?

With the realisation that Blockchain technology will benefit organisations large and small, unlock incredible opportunities for society and move from a nascent to prevalent technology over the next 5 to 10 years, Matthew Van Niekerk and Roderik van der Veer set up SettleMint in August 2016 with a simple purpose: to make it easy for developers to integrate blockchain technologies into their applications. This product vision addresses the single biggest inhibitor to adoption; developer capabilities.

What is the USP of your product/ service? How will end customers benefit from it?

SettleMint offers companies the shortest path to blockchain business case realisation, making it easy for any organisation to build solutions with Blockchain. The SettleMint platform radically reduces the complexity of the blockchain technology, making it easy to turn a business concept into a working Blockchain application in no time. This way, SettleMint's low code BPaaS solution accelerates the path to leveraging the benefits of blockchain technology: whether those enterprises are looking to improve efficiency, to extend their current products to a new client segment or to completely reinvent an existing business model.

Our chain and infrastructure-agnostic node-wrapping platform includes a suite of APIs, developer tools and frameworks that enable any software developer to build new blockchain based applications or to integrate blockchain functionalities into existing solutions. The platform encapsulates years of R&D on the technical, operational & organisational aspects of Blockchain technology & packages these in fully documented APIs, micro-services, browser components and templates that strip away complexity, providing developers with the building blocks required to easily build full stack applications that incorporate blockchain.

What are your plans in expanding your presence and taking your product to more customers?

Our headquarters are in Belgium and we have offices in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and now India. Our growth strategy is simple; we focus on markets where adoption of blockchain technology is taking place. Next to direct sales, we are expanding our international network of partners and value added resellers that are utilising our technology to extend their current offering to their clients.

Talking about the India market, what scope of growth do you see here and how do you wish to leverage it?

With the large scale successful adoption of digital payments, India is now keen on moving towards adopting blockchain. So India has emerged to adopt and utilise Tech friendly business cases to achieve the set targets and increase awareness for their different sectors.

Almost 60% of the activity in blockchain domain is being explored by the financial sector, followed by 15% public sector, 12% healthcare, 8% by logistics and 5% by other sectors in India Blockchain has found its way into the Indian Fintech ecosystem and with an infrastructure - agnostic - node wrapping platform, we would like to offer different BFSI solutions for building their blockchain business use case in s short span of time. Having experience of working with global names like Standard Chartered Bank, Carrefour Belgium, ELIA, Islamic Bank and many more, we have requisite experience and technology to provide business use for enterprise in India in a very short span of time.

Currently India is at the forefront of blockchain innovation & adaptation and SettleMint India wants to lead the technology delivery for various Blockchain initiatives in India.

What are the advantages of blockchain technology and how can it help in the growth of the economy?

Blockchain technologies offer the possibility to reduce back office reconciliation, the possibility to remove intermediaries and the possibility to redefine business models and are expected to unleash 3 trillion USD in business value over the next 10 years according to Gartner research.

We are today at early stages but already there are several production deployments that are beginning to deliver on this value creation. 30% of clients that work with SettleMint’s platform have moved beyond the proof of concept phase and are beginning to realise their respective business cases.

What is the degree of readiness do you see on part of India in adopting blockchain?

The fresh developments in blockchain technology and the outlook of the leaders and bureaucrats on blockchain are in favour of India capitalising on the technology. There are many business cases and sectors which are being explored for blockchain solution, in which 50% of the Indian states are utilising the technology to explore cases like Identity Management, Record Management, Certifications, Land Registrations and many more. Indian State Telangana has been declared as the blockchain district of India where one of the educational institutes has implemented blockchain to record certifications and educational background for easy admissions and tracking of information.

Even the blockchain talent demand is growing by 40% in each quarter in India. NITI AAYOG and TRAI have also declared that relevant use cases are being deployed to track use of blockchain technology.

SBI leads as the first bank to use KYC and facilitate remittances based on blockchain, followed by banks like Axis, HDFC, ICICI that are implementing blockchain for its KYC and trade finance procedures.

We are hopeful that the adoption would rise sharply and pilots would move to production in FY20.