What gave Uniken from India Hong Kong’s fintech prize

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Digital security firm Gemalto recently surveyed 3,773 IT security personnel in 11 countries, including India and Japan. More than half of them reported an average of four security breaches involving payment data in the past two years, according to the survey results released today.

The scale of this risk will only rise rapidly as mobile payments and digital wallets catch on. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said they expect security risks to increase, and more than half were unsure if their organizations were equipped to handle the new risks.

Cyber security firm Uniken, headquartered in the US with its innovation center in Pune, India, tackles one of the weak links in data security: the digital networks that connect an enterprise to its partners, customers, and employees. Uniken’s patented plug-and-play product REL-ID enables enterprises to create private networks where only authorized users, apps, and devices can gain access. In other words, it’s a secure private internet that allows protection across multiple touch points in a massively scalable way, instead of having to lay out multiple layers of security.

Best growth stage startup

Photo credit: Pixabay

Yesterday in Hong Kong, this innovative software product from India got a big thumbs-up when Uniken was chosen as the best growth stage startup in the 2016 Fintech Finals competition. The competition is part of the StartupHK and InvestHK initiatives led by the Hong Kong government.

While some of India’s leading banks like Axis Bank and Bank of India already use Uniken’s product, the company aims to expand its use across the digital domain. “Today we are focused on fintech because financial institutions need to lock down systems. However, we are developing clients in healthcare, ecommerce, and sensitive infrastructure areas such as oil, gas, and electric utilities. You will also see us in the IoT space very soon,” Bimal Gandhi, CEO of Uniken, tells Tech in Asia.

Apart from India, an endorsement from Hacktics has gained Uniken acceptance in the highly security conscious environment of Israel. The Asia-Pacific region is a new target market, so the award in one of the leading fintech competitions in the region comes as a timely boost.

Besides Uniken, another startup from India which made it to the 2016 Fintech Finals in Hong Kong is SayPay. The Bangalore-based firm uses voice recognition to assign unique identities for digital payments. This aims to remove inefficiencies in text-based payment authentication processes which often fail in poorly connected areas and also exclude many who are unable to read and key in one-time passwords.

Fintech was one of the hottest sectors in India last year, drawing over US$1.2 billion in funding.

See: India’s funding pattern in 5 graphs