What drives a company to achieve unmatched success are its grit and commitment to overcome any adversity. Challenging times such as the COVID-19 pandemic have put numerous businesses and entrepreneurs to the test.
Those who strove to scale their business operations in this period leveraged resources and opportunities and were the ones immune to the ripples of the pandemic’s impact. We at Insights Success came across a similar story in our endeavor to find such exceptional companies. The story of Panamax Inc and its journey as a leader in the Fintech space.
Established in the year 2001, Panamax is the technology unit of Bankai Group that provides fintech and telecom technology solutions and services to banks, financial institutions, governments, telecom operators, and enterprises.
Panamax enables users to multiply their business profitability by leveraging its fundamentally superior digital financial platform based on true microservice architecture. Through its telecom solutions, the company enhances the performance of heterogeneous network connections, boost-up the efficiency of carriers, and intensifies the capacity of congested networks. Panamax is committed to providing long-term solutions to its customers by offering a comprehensive ecosystem comprising of an innovative platform, applications, and services.
Setting Benchmarks
With over two decades of experience in the industry, Panamax has enriched its technological expertise with each passing phase and completion of projects. In addition, the company has established a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure and brought on board an expert and qualified team of IT professionals to deliver world-class solutions to its global clientele. Panamax has also won several awards and accolades for our products, which define the company as the market leader and differentiate it from the others in the domain.
“Our industry experience, detailed research, and customizability of solutions is what makes Panamax one of a kind,” says Bankim Brahmbhatt, the Group President and CEO.
Panamax’s flagship digital financial solution MobiFin Elite boasts of an innovative integration of Elliptic Curve Cryptography 256 bit into the platform that is synonymous with the most advanced security ever known. The platform thereby helps nullify theft, fraud, and mismanagement, and makes for the most secure option. This certified encryption method is also used by the US government and National Security Agency.
MobiFin Elite also features a true microservice architecture to deliver enhanced performance with highly flexible deployment. This architecture of the platform includes a Kafka-based messaging bus that breaks down a service into multiple sub-execution units making it more configurable. These state-of-the-art features make MobiFin Elite a leading player in the fintech market.
Exemplary Expertise
At the helm of Panamax’s ceaseless ascend towards zeniths of success is Bankim Brahmbhatt, the Group Chairman and CEO.
As a leader, Bankim has been the guiding force behind the success of the company since its inception. With an experience of more than 27 years, unparalleled business acumen, ingenious leadership, and foresightedness, he has enabled the Group to scale global footprints through leading telecom and technology companies of Bankai Division – Broadband Telecom Inc., BridgeVoice Inc., CallnRoam Inc., Panamax Inc., SMShopWorld and Carriox Capital.
Under his leadership, Bankai Group was recognized as Commission India’s First Private Group Telephone Exchange in 1994. An early opportunity identifier, Bankim has worked closely with multi-functional teams to develop, launching new products, and gaining leadership positions. He has been an innovator par excellence with leading products like BridgeVoice Pluto that have changed the course of online routing. For his visionary leadership style, Bankim was also recognized as one of the Top 20 Innovators by Capacity Magazine in the year 2018.
As excerpts from his journey as a seasoned industry professional, Bankim shares valuable insights for those aspiring to venture into the fintech niche saying, “Fintech is a big industry today populated by several players and now also witnessing collaborations on all levels. Traditional banks are expanding further with their services and involving latest technologies like open banking, AI, ML, and conversational bots to better communicate with their customers.”
“The banks already brag a large customer base that makes it easier for them to reach out to a larger population. Fintech on the other hand has the benefit of technology and futuristic vision. All aspiring fintech entrepreneurs must understand that the industry will only become more collaborative with both banks and fintech combining their strengths and bringing digital transformation in the way financial services are conducted and perceived. While the budding fintech entrepreneurs must trust their skills and knowledge, they should not see traditional banks as their competitors but rather a medium to reach out to more and more people,” he adds.
Overcoming Adversities
Panamax started its operations by offering telecom technology solutions to MNOs and MVNOs primarily. Being a part of the Bankai Group that handled carrier services, it only came as an organic business expansion due to its existing strong network of telecom customers.
The early 2000s were challenging times for businesses, particularly involved in technology, as the industry was still in its nascent stages with uncertainty looming due to strict regulatory requirements in different countries.
Over the next few years, Panamax delved into digital financial solutions with a passion for providing financial inclusion in the remotest parts of the world. During this time, the company expanded its team exponentially to include some of the top veterans and together as a team made waves into various markets, further strengthening its network of customers, particularly in the developing countries.
“Today, while the acceptance for fintech has improved, so has the competition and the swiftly changing technology has further made it a tough market. However, with our industry experience and evolving solutions and services we are trusted by enterprises from several industries,” adds Bankim.
Talking about the challenges that Panamax came across during the pandemic, Bankim says, “COVID-19 pandemic certainly was one of the biggest challenges we faced as an organization in recent times. It affected our workforce, and customers alike, however, it further strengthened the foundation of our industry and brought a sharp shift in the adoption of digital financial solutions and services. We have always focused on business resilience with our platform supporting High Availability and Disaster Recovery with Kafka extensions for context-based mirroring and microservice logic. This helped us provide excellent services to our clients, with optimal usage of software.”
“During the pandemic, more and more enterprises and governments moved to contactless payments strengthening the case for fintech organizations. We ensured that both our employees and business take the minimal hit in these unprecedented times, and this was supported by our technological resilience.”
“Right at the start of the pandemic, we ensured our employees got to work from the safety of their homes with all that is needed at their disposal. We also arranged vaccinations for our employees and their families as soon as they were made available by the local authorities.” adds Bankim.
Towards a Promising Future
We asked Bankim about his vision for Panamax’s journey forward, to which he expressed, “As we come fresh off the 2020 pandemic, 2021 is a year full of opportunities with respect to the operations, and finances.”
“The pandemic let us focus on our digital financial platform MobiFin Elite as we further enhanced its technical capabilities with distinctive features like no-code low-code, API first, AI-enabled conversational banking to name a few.”
“By the end of 2021, we aim to scale up our operations in remote countries across APAC and LATAM regions and have already expanded our team to cover these territories. We also look to further augment MobiFin Elite strengthening its security, feature set, and time to market,” Bankim concluded.
Exhibiting Excellence
Following are Panamax’s Achievements and accomplishments:
2021 – MobiFin Elite announced as one of the 10 Most Recommended Fintech Solutions Providers by CIO Insider Magazine
2021 – Technoviti 2021 by Banking Frontiers
2020 – CC Global Awards 2020 – GCCM Technology Innovation Award
2020 – Acquisition International – Best Digital Financial Solution 2020 – USA
2019 – 50 Most Promising Fintech Solution Providers
2018 – CV Magazine Technology Innovator Award 2018
