Bankim Brahmbhatt, President & CEO, Panamax Inc.: “Our technologies and solutions have played a pivotal role in enabling service providers, resellers, and content providers around the world to evolve communication and mobile financial services”

Fintech firms and mobile operators are obviously two different entities: different cultures, different industries, and different sizes. But what brings them together is the fact that they can collaborate and deliver an innovative and secure solution to market at scale. By working together with fintech firms, telcos can not only gain extra support from other business segments but also gain access to robust financial technologies that the fintech providers use. Cooperation between both segments has existed for a long time, but now it has matured enough to have major strategic alliances.

Globally there are various companies delivering excellent fintech solutions for telcos, but Panamax stands out from the rest. Panamax Inc offers Fintech and Telecom solutions to BFSI and Telecom industries worldwide. The New York-based IT solutions and services provider offers industry-leading solutions like Digital Financial Solutions, Digital Banking Suite, Customer Value Management, Fraud Management, Revenue Management, Network Switching Solutions, Monitoring Solutions, as well as Consulting and Managed Services. Its Fintech solutions encompass unmatched security, flexible configurability, and a cloud-enabled multi-tenant system. The award-winning robust and secure digital financial services platform “MobiFin Elite” has been redefining fintech for the past 7-8years.

In conversation with Bankim Brahmbhatt, President & CEO of Panamax

Q. What was the motivation behind starting Panamax?

Panamax Inc’s humble start was motivated by my vision to make finance accessible through technology under financial inclusion. Panamax came into existence to empower Telcos, Mobile Money Service Providers, Banks and Retailers, Mobile Network Operators, MVNOs, Mobile Money Service Providers (MMSPs), Merchants, Financial Institutions, and Governments with innovative, targeted, scalable, secured, and localized mobile financial services.

Q. How do you optimize and update your application regularly? How do you gather insights from clients or their consumers directly?

Panamax believes in continuous improvement and 360-degree feedbacks. Panamax is also known for providing customized solutions. So, in addition to the regular updates in software and architectural changes, Panamax updates the offerings as per the need of a client. There is a designated project manager with a support team comprising of subject matter experts assigned to clients to understand their needs and their change in requirements as the enterprise grows.

Q. What are the latest technologies leveraged by you to provide exceptional financial services?

• New-age True Microservices Architecture offers agility, independent scalability, and resilience. Flexile inter-microservices messaging, Kafka integrated dynamic thread pool, and non-blocking asynchronous parallel processing of activities including isolation of fault and independent healing, help in optimum utilization of hardware resources and accelerate processing speed.
• 256-bit Elliptic Curve Cryptography is the most-secured encryption that ensures near-zero frauds in financial transactions. An elliptic curve is often said to be the “algebraic curve of genus one.” This kind of cryptography not only demands accountability but also assures anonymity with the help of smaller keys offering comparable strength to that of the other security systems.
• No-Code, Low-Code Approach provides an intuitive user interface (UI) that allows financial service providers to use a ‘Lego-like’ bottom to top building approach to make software service building blocks and collate them to create digital payment products and services.
• API-first Approach and intuitive UI enabled technology teams to rapidly do seamless integrations with third-party systems using standard protocols without any coding. This reduces integration time by over 90% leading to faster time to market.
• Holistic Analytics and Monitoring powered by ELK stack (with Kibana) offer real-time transaction and system monitoring, providing a 360-degree view of critical system statistics, application status, and logs. It proactively identifies threshold breaches and provides real-time notifications for corrective actions, preventing system downtime. Efficient Disaster Recovery solutions ensure high service availability even during routine maintenance.

Q. How do you streamline your services without compromising data security?

• MobiFin Elite uses Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), the most advanced and secure asymmetric cryptography for data and transaction security. It provides strong PSD2 authentication, using a combination of password, OTP, and biometrics. Various authentications – Device, OAUTH (Re), Multi-Factor, API, Secure Web Access, and OWASPA 2 provide holistic security. It facilitates service, user, and KYC profile-based transaction thresholds; transaction notifications; AML and blacklist checks; cyclic, duplicate, transaction spike, and high-value transaction alerts; and velocity checks to prevent frauds and comply with regulations. The features include
• Elliptic Curve Cryptography approach for asymmetric and symmetric key cryptography system.
• Optimal key size providing superior performance compared to RSA.
• The certified encryption method used by the US government and the National Security Agency.
• Biometrics, e-signature, OTP, integrations with national ID registries.
• Pre-integrated with market-leading IAM providers.
• API-enabled KYC implementation.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

New services to be launched in the coming years include BNPL (buy now pay later), leveraging gamification strategy, offering advanced services in the mobile wallet, and rapid growth in the crypto wallet segment.

Q. What makes MobiFin the Preferred Choice?

The features making MobiFin the Preferred Choice are:

• 20+ years of global experience – Extensive experience across markets and a team of subject matter experts. Our knowledge pool got you covered.
• Trusted by millions – Our clients and their customers vouch for our secure solutions that have been helping them for years.
• Market presence – We have offices in 5 countries and 125+ Global customers. We are available wherever you are.
• Deployment options – On-premises, cloud, or hybrid. You choose the deployment option as per your infrastructure and requirement.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

According to Research & Markets, global digital payments are expected to grow by 80% in 5 years, from $5 trillion in 2020 to $9 trillion in 2025. Juniper Research estimates that global digital wallet users will increase from 2.6 billion in 2020 to 4.4 billion in 2025, covering 72% of the world’s adult population. Panamax is eager to tap into this vast opportunity by innovating customer-centric solutions to rapidly meet evolving digital payment and banking needs of consumers, keeping pace with their digital lifestyle. As consumers progress into the digital era further, Panamax’s digital payments and banking solution is gearing up to offer better, faster, and technically future-proof solutions. The company will also be leveraging new use cases for consumer connivance in fintech as well as accelerating financial inclusion.

Meet the leader behind the success of Panamax

Mr. Bankim Brahmbhatt, President & CEO of Panamax and his inspiration behind the company’s inception, can be summarized by a study at MIT’s Leadership Center, which notes that “Faced with more complex challenges in business and the world at large, many leaders are embracing what some traditionalists may call anti-leadership. Instead of focusing primarily on managing their people, many leaders are fixing their attention on the problems at hand, and unintentionally leading people to get excited about the solutions they are striving for.” Twenty years ago, Mr. Brahmbhatt had a vision of a financially inclusive society, and that remains Panamax’s focus even now.

“Panamax is a sound integration of conceptualization, optimization, performance, and configuration. These four aspects are the cornerstones of our product suites”