The funding will be used to launch its ‘digital twin solution’, the TWINN
Percipient, a Singapore-based digital banking technology startup, has raised US$5 million funding from Silicon Valley-based venture capital (VC) company Stat Zero as of July 20, to support the launch of its pioneering ‘digital twin solution,’ the TWINN.
While businesses around the world were scrambling to digitize operations even pre-COVID-19, the pandemic has accelerated the proces,s with consumers looking for digital alternatives for traditional products and services amid social distancing norms and movement restrictions.
Banks, however, have been trailing in the digitization movement because of the high-costs and disruption risks associated with the full-blown replacement of their legacy systems and processes. Fully digital banks are proving to be stiff competition to traditional banks because of their new features, better savings interest rates, and lower life insurance fees and costs.
The TWINN will allow banks and insurers to rapidly create a lightweight, enhanced and API-ready representation of enterprise data and processes alongside the existence of legacy systems, eliminating the need for full blown migrations and the associated costs and risks, according to the press release.
Implementation of TWINN will allow organizations to add or transition to new-age product processors, cloud platforms, and fintech solutions, and allow for AI-powered banking without retiring or reconstructing legacy systems, the startup claims.
Developed over three years by former global banking technology leaders, the TWINN is the world’s first digital twin for financial services, according to the press release.
The TWINN will be first piloted by a UAE-based bank, and the project is expected to be completed by the end of October, 2020.
Founded in 2014 by four financial services professionals, Percipient is a data technology company based in Singapore, which helps companies simplify their data architecture. Their flagship product, UNICONNECT, hyper-accelerates connectivity between data sources that do not communicate, or are too expensive to integrate.
Percipient is Stat Zero’s first investment since it announced the launch of its billion dollar digital co-investment platform to invest in impact ventures and emerging technologies in May last year. Stat Zero aims to solve global challenges through financing commercial R&D, investing in bold entrepreneurs, and co-investing in ecosystem building micro funds.
Marquis Cabrera, Co-founder and CEO of Stat Zero, who currently serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Council for AR and VR, is keen to explore the potential of domain-led technology companies like Percipient.
“Stat Zero is committed to helping companies digitize, and the TWINN, with its ‘use-what-you-have’ design, turns the current digital transformation process on its head. Prohibitive costs and timelines are replaced by non-invasive, ready-to-use digital components,” he said in the press release.
“The potential impact on mid-to lower tier financial institutions, the long tail of digital laggards within the industry, will be both wide ranging and significant,” he added.
Percipient Co-founder and CEO, Navin Suri said, “Digital transformation approaches in financial services have not kept pace with changing demand. Now with the COVID-19 pandemic, the pace of digital transformation has further shifted gears. There is no time to lose in the race to offer frictionless digital financial services that cater to everyone, not just the young and tech-savvy.”
“The Percipient team has experienced the challenges of system transformation first-hand. This Stat Zero funding will help us reach the many financial services companies that are looking for a faster, simpler, more cost-effective and future-compatible way to solve these,” he added.
Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash
