Client Background
The client is a leading small finance bank in India with a retail and inclusion-focused franchise serving underbanked and emerging customer segments. As larger private-sector banks increasingly partnered with fintechs to accelerate credit decisioning, digital onboarding and transaction banking, the bank recognised that building every capability in-house would be slow and costly. Its IT steering committee wanted an evidence-based view of where collaboration with fintechs could deliver the greatest value, rather than evaluating individual partnership proposals in isolation. Cedar was engaged to define the priority focus areas for fintech collaboration and to ground them in documented use cases from the Indian banking market.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar applied a structured research and use case mapping approach, organising the fintech opportunity into three focus areas, each broken down into three capability themes, and profiling twelve documented bank-fintech collaborations in India. Every case was analysed on a consistent template covering the participants, the business problem, the solution highlights and the impact realised.
AI/ML and Analytics – Cedar examined how Indian banks have used alternative data and machine learning to extend credit to thin-file customers, run real-time transaction monitoring with dynamic risk scoring, tailor agricultural credit to crop and weather cycles, and build sharper customer segments for cross-sell and personalisation.
API Banking – Cedar reviewed collaborations that embed banking services directly into business platforms, including ERP-integrated payments and reconciliation, API-led expense and payroll processing for enterprises, automated bulk corporate payouts, and API-driven debt collection with digital borrower communication and legal workflow automation.
Intelligent Automation – Cedar assessed AI-powered customer due diligence and document verification at onboarding, intelligent capture and extraction of financial documents using OCR and natural language processing, and distributed ledger solutions for shared KYC records and smart-contract-based trade finance.
Fintech Landscape and Use Case Consolidation – Cedar consolidated the findings into a set of priority use cases for each focus area, such as real-time fraud prevention, alternative-data credit assessment, embedded payments, digital account opening and automated compliance reporting, and mapped the leading Indian fintech players active in each space.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The findings were presented to the bank's IT steering committee, giving leadership a single, structured view of the fintech collaboration landscape anchored in outcomes that peer banks had already achieved, from faster onboarding and improved fraud detection to broader credit access for underserved segments. The three-area framework allowed the committee to compare opportunities on a like-for-like basis and to see which capabilities were better sourced through partnership than built internally.
The way forward centres on prioritising the use cases most aligned with the bank's customer segments and risk appetite, engaging shortlisted fintechs from the mapped landscape, and moving the most promising collaborations into controlled pilots supported by appropriate due diligence on integration, data security and regulatory compliance.