Meet Pencilton

Pencilton is a modern card issuing venture that lets parents give pocket money to their kids while having an overview of their expenditure & teaching them valuable real-life practical money skills.

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The grand mission of Pencilton is to provide financial education to teens from a nascent stage, along with making life easier for parents to manage the finances of their kids. Pencilton offers physical and virtual cards accessible through the Pencilton app that offers many features, controls, and analytics suitable for children and parents. 

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Launched in 2019 amidst the lush green plateau of Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad, Pencilton aims to take a slice of India’s booming prepaid cards market, which is tipped to grow at a CAGR of 31% to $89.9 billion by 2025.

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The Problems: Manual Onboarding Checks and Age Verification

As with any card issuer company, the first thing on Pencilton’s mind was to onboard good users. The Pencilton app requires parents to upload their PAN and Aadhar cards to verify their identities. 

Pencilton wanted to keep the onboarding process smooth and complete the registration in less than a minute. To do so, Pencilton needed to perfect their instant onboarding process. They had to ensure that a suitable mechanism was in place to capture user data instantaneously while reducing exposure to fraudulent account openings. 

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As an early-stage startup, Pencilton needed to solve the age-old problem of balancing fraud and friction with limited resources. Also, stringent KYC processes required by the partner bank did not plead the 1-minute registration case well. 

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The Solution: Using Bureau’s One-API Risk Orchestration Platform, Prism

Pencilton's team quickly acknowledged the necessity of investing early in a partner to take care of risk and compliance. They used Prism to: 

Verify User’s Identity in Real-time

Prism’s one-API helped Pencilton verify the PAN and Aadhar details provided by the users from the official database instantaneously. Prism also fetches the rich data behind ID documents such as name record, DOB, address, father’s name, etc., to understand the users better.

Matching User Inputs with Official Database

Card issuing companies are seeing a tremendous rise in fraud cases perpetrated via stolen or fudged identities. Hence, Pencilton was keen to establish whether user inputs matched the data from the official sources. Prism's Name Match functionality helped by providing a match score between the name user provided in the app and the name fetched from official databases. 

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Auto-switch Data Sources for Low Latency

ID data sources tend to be unreliable with frequent downtime and high latency. Prism helped Pencilton overcome this challenge by introducing more data sources into the game and auto-switching between them. It resulted in lower latency and thus, faster onboarding.

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Over time, Prism identified the data source with the lowest latency for Pencilton and made it the preferred choice for fetching ID data. 

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The Result: Automated Onboarding, Risk Profiling, and Low Latency

Pencilton was able to keep their promise of quick onboarding by leveraging Prism to automate KYC compliance, risk profile users, and expedite the whole onboarding process. 

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“Working with the Bureau team has been a breeze and a relief. A breeze because of the well-built API documentation and the seamless guidance we got while on-boarding. And relief because of the range of solutions available, which gave us the freedom to choose the best possible solution that fits our needs, rather than building our product flows according to the solutions available, which we had faced many times before partnering with Bureau.

All of this is tied together by this fantastic team who is a true partner in every true sense - ready to innovate together to build solutions that solve & scale. Truly amazing.”‍

- Vishwajeet Pureti, Co-founder and CTO, Pencilton

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