Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Sashi Narahari, CEO of HighRadius (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Go down one level further. What kind of heuristics are we talking about here?

Sashi Narahari: Let’s take a simple example. You are a company and you bill High Radius. We would transfer $3,400 to the bank. Let’s say you use Bank of America. Then there’s an email about the payment.

The AI technology automatically parses the email. It could be the attachment or the body. It first uses a clustering technique. It will figure out where the remittance information is. Sometimes it could be in an Excel or an attachment.

After it classifies that the remittance is in the PDF attachment, it reconstructs the whole attachment from a character level to a word level and to a sentence level. It interprets what invoices, what payments got paid, and what were discounts.

It’s like how you would do it visually. It’s like you’re looking at a remittance. A lot of this information is a combination of structured and unstructured data and uses multiple algorithms to classify and tag every letter and word as relevant or not.

Then we take the $3,400 payment that went into the bank, figure out that this particular email was for that, and then go into a system like SAP and post the payment to the customer account and clear all those invoices. 

Sramana Mitra: SAP doesn’t have this functionality?

Sashi Narahari: Definitely not. SAP is a very old system. It’s a CRUD system. In most software systems, it’s a centralized system to update, delete, and read information. It’s just a basic workflow system between users. Decades back, it was not even possible to do this. AI was not commercial enough.

Secondly, the data processing wasn’t available. It’s a very unique combination of the cloud technologies that are available where you can process high volumes of data. Also, the AI algorithms are commercially available, so you can combine them and solve problems that have never been solved before.

Sramana Mitra: The category of companies that you’re talking about, whether it’s Bill.com or Blackline, we’ve covered extensively. We would categorize them as SaaS and not FinTech. I’m curious why you want to be featured in the FinTech series. What’s FinTech about what you’re doing?

Sashi Narahari: Define fintech. That might help as an answer.

Sramana Mitra: Bulk of the FinTech activity that we’re seeing are in payments and credit. The two overriding categories are enormous numbers of variations and flavors of credit and numerous variations of payments. 

Sashi Narahari: We do both of them. I gave you one use case. We have Credit Cloud. We help companies make credit decisions on their customers. Who has a high degree of probability to default? How much credit should we offer?

On the payments side, we have a few partners. Natively, we can help our clients accept any form of payment barring crypto. We also do level 3 processing to reduce the interchange fees. It’s very important in the B2B world. It doesn’t matter if it’s SaaS or FinTech to me. We are a software company. We sell to the large enterprises. We are as FinTech as it gets. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Sashi Narahari, CEO of HighRadius
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