Silot: Embrace Banking Future with an Integrated Approach

For decades, functions in banks have been mired in a muddle of silos, resulting in high operational cost and inefficiencies. “The lack of agility in the existing banking infrastructure is not in tandem with the evolving consumer behavior and has led to complacency and redundancies in the industry,” observes Andy Li, former SEA Garena and Baidu Payment International veteran and CEO of Silot, a Singapore-headquartered fintech company that sets new standards of commercial data solutions tapping Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies to provide financial institutions with next generation efficiency and capability.

The majority of the current banking infrastructures were built to handle pre-existing payment methods such as cash and credit cards. In light of the emerging online payments that are gaining traction in one of the world’s most densely populated regions, Silot has built a new unified payment engine incorporating QR code-based transactions that can be configured into the existing banking infrastructure to accommodate future e-payments.

Silot enables banks through its proprietary branded solution platforms. The Silot Banking Platform is designed to optimize existing banking infrastructures by connecting different payment silos in on-boarding, management and security phases, empowering banks and merchants with a single-panel view to enable, operate and manage new payments through one integrated platform.

Since founded little over a year ago, Silot’s growth has been nothing short of a whirlwind and its strenuous efforts in making investments on AI and blockchain-enabled IT infrastructure is a reflection of Andy’s resolution in marrying insight with foresight.

Today it takes approximately one to two weeks at least for a bank to bring a merchant onboard, involving face-to-face engagement. “The Silot Merchant Suite (SMS) effectively reduces up to 80 percent of the operation time, and brings three times, or even faster merchant onboarding to the bank with a single platform for all onboarding processes,” explains Andy.

SMS assists banks and merchants to work in unison with the aid of marketing promotional coupons as per the target audience of the merchants. It employs machine learning that assists merchants to connect with their target customer group directly. Furthermore, SMS enables merchants to analyze digital payments and business transaction data on real-time basis, through the Silot web and app dashboards, wherein deep data analytics helps the merchants in understanding their business better. Banks, on the other hand, can utilize the platform to gather comprehensive merchant data and offer financial products such as shorter settlement cycles as well as pre-approved loans to merchants.

The Silot Payment Engine (SPE), another proprietary branded product, is a payment engine integrated with all the significant mobile payments such as Visa QR, Mastercard QR, Prompt-Pay, PayNet, NETS QR, and the likes. SPE can connect with bank’s backend, facilitating payment issue and acquiring processes from a single platform. Silot also offers Silot Guardian, a unified anti-fraud and anti-money-laundering system, which ensures safe on-boarding and transactional activities. Silot Guardian leverages both modern and legacy functions and data sources, to create a truly 360 degree AF/AML engine for both payment and on-boarding. A supporting function built in the Silot Banking Platform, Silot Guardian leverages the fraud information across all payment channels, to realize more active anti-fraud detections.

A strategic partner with VISA, Silot has bagged the People’s Choice Award of VISA Everywhere Initiative in Thailand. Having established footholds in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Australia, the young and hungry team is vying for strong growth in South East Asia. “Fintech has disrupted the conventional banking mechanisms, and Silot aims to empower financial institutions with innovation and connectivity–so that banks are better prepared for the future that is already coming,” says Andy confidently.