Vaibhav Tambe, Co-founder & CEO of TransBnk, about reimagining transaction banking by unifying fragmented financial systems into a single API-driven platform and how AWS helped them scale rapidly .
India’s banking ecosystem has undergone a profound digital transformation, driven by policy reforms, and rapid adoption of UPI. While retail banking has evolved into a seamless, user-centric experience, corporate banking continues facing challenges due to fragmented systems and manual processes. This has created a clear need for unified, technology-driven solutions to streamline transactions, reconciliations and enable businesses to manage banking relationships with multiple banks more efficiently.
The “Crafting Bharat – Season 3” presented by AWS Startups, an initiative by NewsReach and production partner – HT Smartcast, explores the founders’ resilience, agility and passion to build a super startup and inspire the next wave of entrepreneurs. This series is hosted by Gautam Srinivasan, famed for hosting a diverse range of TV and digital programs, currently consulting editor at CNBC (India), CNN-News18, Forbes India, and The Economic Times.
In this episode, we highlight Vaibhav Tambe, Co-founder & CEO of TransBnk, as he discusses reimagining transaction banking by unifying fragmented financial systems into a single API-driven platform and how AWS helped them scale rapidly along with maintaining complex compliances. Discover the inspiring where we deconstruct the blueprint of growth for India’s super startups through this series.
Edited Excerpts:
Can you walk us through your transition from leaving a comfortable corporate role to building a startup?
I believe two things are essential to building any startup, especially in fintech: a clearly defined problem statement and deep empathy for the customer to solve the problem statement. During our time in banking, we repeatedly heard customers express the need for a unified platform that could work across multiple banks. Corporate banking is inherently complex, with businesses relying on several banking partners for different use cases. Over the years, through interactions with many customers, we closely understood these challenges and experienced their pain points firsthand. This gave us strong clarity on product-market fit. We were not just identifying a problem, we had lived it and understood it in depth. That foundation made the transition into entrepreneurship more natural.
At the same time, the broader fintech evolution in India, especially with innovations like UPI, demonstrated how powerful shared infrastructure can be. It showed that financial systems can be simplified and built as foundational layers. Drawing from that inspiration and our experience of working with multiple banks, we developed a strong understanding of both the architectural and compliance requirements. This helped us shape a clear approach to building a scalable and unified transaction banking platform.
How do you balance autonomous AI systems with the need for human oversight in high-stakes areas like debt syndication and loan monitoring? You previously mentioned a three-to-five-year timeline for LLMs to mature from a data and compliance standpoint. Do you still see that timeline holding, or could adoption happen faster?
AI has consistently evolved faster than expected. Based on my interactions with global banks and fintech leaders, I believe this shift could happen within the next two to three years. What has changed is the speed at which solutions can now be built. Once there is a deep understanding of the problem, fintechs can rapidly develop applications across interfaces such as mobile, web, APIs, and SDKs. Combined with the growing maturity of financial infrastructure, this is accelerating progress significantly.
For example, a CFO looking at analytics or cash flow forecasting can now access insights almost instantly, rather than relying on spreadsheets or delayed bank statements. With that said, strong guardrails remain critical. We focus on regulatory compliance, data protection standards, and certifications such as ISO and SOC2. It is also important to assess how AI generates outputs, whether it is read-only or could act upon it.
Currently, many AI use cases are focused on analytics and early warning signals, where extensive testing ensures reliability. As more active use cases emerge, collaboration across the ecosystem will be essential. Industry-wide frameworks and increasing access to AI tools are helping create a more structured and responsible approach to adoption.
How has AWS helped you scale rapidly while maintaining compliance, especially since balancing both can be challenging for startups?
If you look at platforms like UPI or similar large-scale systems, they would not be possible without highly scalable cloud infrastructure. For instance, when we process thousands of transactions per second, it requires a very high level of reliability and infrastructure support. Over the past few years, AWS has provided not just consistency but a strong sense of reliability in our operations. Their team has been proactive in introducing new tools and ensuring our teams could easily understand and adopt them. This made a significant difference, as our focus was on solving the problem while the technology layer became much easier to navigate.
From a technical standpoint, observability and accuracy are critical for us. The tools available through AWS and its marketplace have helped us quickly build, test, and deploy solutions in a simple and efficient environment. Additionally, the range of evolving tools, including those related to AI and large language models, has helped us stay ahead. The proactive support and ecosystem offered by AWS have enabled us to anticipate challenges and address them effectively while continuing to scale.
Stay tuned to Crafting Bharat – Season 3 as we bring you these inspiring entrepreneurs for insightful and candid discussions with Gautam Srinivasan.
Quote: “Our cloud-first approach ensures we can take our platform global without rebuilding from scratch.”
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