Putting his 17 years of experience to use, Vaibhav Tambe has built one of India’s fastest-growing and most secure transactional banking companies, TransBnk. He envisions changing India’s transactional banking landscape with his innovative and safe solutions. As a people’s CEO, Vaibhav Tambe takes every measure to ensure an ecosystem of growth, prosperity, and strength for his team and his organisation.
When not working, Vaibhav Tambe spends his time with his friends and family and travels. In fact, his relationship-building skills have made his colleagues, vendors, and customers reliable friends. TradeFlock interviewed Vaibhav Tambe to understand more about his company, his skills, and more.
Please highlight your professional journey.
I bring nearly 17 years of industry experience, which I earned through some rough and tough journeys. I started my career with TCS as a Software Developer, and after my MBA, I started with SBI in the transaction banking segment. Right from product development, and business development to various operational aspects, I got to learn a lot. My next move was with IndusInd Bank into their transaction banking sales department, where I grew to the post of leading—Payments, CMS, and Escrow Sales for all large & institutional businesses. During this stint, I managed a team of nearly 50 people and books worth around ₹400 crore.
As a team, we worked on the entire stack of payments, including B2B payments, corporate banking, and some aspects of investment banking. I gained extensive knowledge of global remittance, product and core business domains, various regulatory aspects, as well as solidified relationships. These helped win several international awards for many clients like Bajaj Finance, Aditya Birla Capital, Vodafone, and others. I was then offered to join a listed fintech company as its payments CEO. After some time, I realised my calling and started my own transaction banking company, TransBnk, along with my co-founders.
Our client journey has been very exciting so far, and we are looking at building a bigger team and expanding globally.
What have been your three biggest lessons?
The most important aspect of any organisation or business is its people, whether it’s our team, vendors, or customers. I give importance to the relationship and priorities of the individual. No amount of money or rewards can motivate an employee more than compassion and trust. The second is core domain knowledge. Without it, it is impossible to build a large, sustainable business. We regularly upskill ourselves through various training courses.
Last but not least, you must be willing to take calculated risks because there is no brand without risk. Banking is a risky business, and hence, every step should be accessed, and risks should be quantified to mitigate them. Without taking a risk, plunging to the next peak is impossible.
Banking is all about trust. How do you build it among your stakeholders and align the digital experience safely and securely?
That is the reason we are building our business. It is digital and compliant with regulatory norms, and it has a secured layer of corporate transaction banking. This is the vision statement for our business. We predominantly focus on digitising every aspect of the banking business for a smoother and safer transaction while reducing the TAT. This helps us build a robust business model that can be replicated according to the needs of our customers. To make the process secure, I and my co-founders use our transactional banking experience to build a solid foundation to mitigate any problem statements.
What are the various types of risks you see within the transaction banking space?
There are three types of broader risks associated with transactional banking – financial market linked to the macroeconomic system, operational, and credit risk. We use a combination of technology stacks, including AI, blockchain, and a combination of Web2 and Web3. These add layers of security and safety features to our solutions.
What is the one biggest challenge you foresee, and how are you mitigating it?
As I mentioned earlier, keeping people motivated and aligned with the company’s vision is the biggest challenge for any organisation today. At TransBnk, we try to bring a lot of energy into the ecosystem by adding more qualified and competent people. While other organisations are firing their talented people, we took advantage of the situation and are hiring the brightest minds to build TransBnk along with us.
We have raised a considerable amount of money for this and leveraged technology to create an environment that will help them grow within the organisation. We are honest and transparent in all of our interactions with our employees, and we have given them complete freedom to experiment and learn. As an organisation, we are completely aligned with our employees’ goals.
Another challenge that I observe within the industry is complying with the regulatory grey areas, which most of the fintechs and startups fail to do. Hence, many of them vanish into oblivion. Hence, we comply with every regulatory change to ensure we are abiding by the law.
What is your future roadmap?
We are looking at new use cases around supply chain finance, trade finance, or cross-border remittances. We will also soon expand geographically, especially to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the UK, and the US.
