Kumar Bahukhandi
Decentro, the full-stack banking and fintech infrastructure platform used by 2,000+ enterprises, has closed out its strongest award season to date. The company has been named Fintech Company of the Year at the India Fintech Awards 2026, hosted by the Unified Fintech Forum (UFF), and has won the Embedded Finance Innovation Award at the 4th Edition Bharat NBFC & FinTech Summit & Awards 2026. At the same summit, Founder and CEO Rohit Taneja was named Emerging Leader of the Year (Under 40).
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Decentro Earns Three Industry Recognitions, reinforcing its Leadership in Fintech Infrastructure and Embedded Finance
Two different juries, evaluating three different things, landed on the same company and the same founder in the same season. Decentro was judged as a business, as a category innovator, and for the leadership behind it. Recognition that points to something more fundamental: an infrastructure stack that most players in the space simply don’t have.
The “boring” part is the actual innovation
Decentro’s approach combines product infrastructure with regulated operating capabilities. The company holds RBI Payment Aggregator (PA) authorisations for online and physical payments, an IFSCA Payment Service Provider licence through its GIFT City entity, and UIDAI Offline Verification Seeking Entity certification. This stack enables enterprises to access bank-grade payment acceptance, identity verification and related financial workflows through a unified integration layer.
The company serves more than 2,000 enterprises across banking, lending, marketplaces, fintech and consumer internet, including large platforms such as AU Small Finance Bank, BharatPe, CRED, Meesho, MakeMyTrip and Muthoot Finance. Decentro’s Payment Aggregator platform supports online and offline payment acceptance, including UPI, bank transfers, recurring mandates and QR-based in-store payments. Public company materials also describe its PA-Physical (PA-P) authorisation as enabling offline payment acceptance alongside its online capabilities.
Decentro processes more than USD12 billion in annual payment volume and 120 million-plus identity verifications a year, with integration timelines cut from months to days and roughly 30% lower operational costs for enterprises building on the stack. The company has also expanded its collections capabilities through Neowise, its conversational AI platform for lending collections. Neowise supports multilingual borrower engagement and human-assisted resolution workflows for lenders, and now handles close to 3 million borrower conversations a month across 12-plus Indian languages, working with lenders including Tata Capital and L&T Finance. Three physical delivery centres and 400+ trained human debt callers support the cases that need a person rather than a bot.
The leadership behind the platform
Rohit Taneja is a two-time fintech founder. Before Decentro, he co-founded Mypoolin, an early social payments platform backed by Accel, which Wibmo later acquired; PayU subsequently acquired Wibmo. He then led product and engineering for Wibmo’s payment gateway business, working with financial institutions across India, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Dubai.
Founded in 2020 by Rohit Taneja and Pratik Daudkhane, Decentro is backed by Y Combinator and offers more than 150 APIs across payments, identity verification, banking and AI-led collections. Under their leadership, the company has secured its PA licence, acquired Neowise, and expanded into cross-border payments infrastructure through its IFSCA licence and GIFT City presence. Decentro’s continued focus is to make financial infrastructure simpler to adopt, so businesses can spend more time building differentiated customer products.
“Being recognised at the company, innovation and leadership levels in the same year is deeply meaningful for all of us at Decentro,” said Rohit Taneja, Co-founder and CEO, Decentro. “We set out to build the infrastructure behind financial products, not another standalone financial product. For our customers, that means faster launches, fewer fragmented integrations, and regulated capabilities that can be embedded directly into their customer experience. These honours reinforce the value of building compliance and reliability into the platform from day one.”
Decentro was named Fintech Company of the Year for its efforts across payments, identity and collections, achieved while staying profitable on a lean ~USD10 million raised to date. Separately, the Bharat NBFC & FinTech Summit recognised Rohit for building a mechanism that lets Decentro’s infrastructure operate seamlessly behind complex banking and financial products.
About Decentro
Decentro is a full-stack banking and fintech infrastructure platform founded in 2020 and backed by notable funds including Y Combinator. It enables businesses to launch and scale financial products through a unified API layer spanning payments, identity verification, banking and AI-led collections. Decentro holds RBI Payment Aggregator authorisations for online and physical payments, an IFSCA Payment Service Provider licence through its GIFT City entity, and UIDAI Offline Verification Seeking Entity certification for offline Aadhaar verification. The platform serves more than 2,000 enterprises across banking, lending, marketplaces and consumer fintech.
