14-05-2025
Behind the platform: The tech thinking behind Spocto X
As digital lending and collections continue to mature, technology plays a central role in ensuring scale, compliance, and meaningful borrower engagement. In this Q&A, Vivek Srikantan, Chief Technology Officer at Spocto X, shares his perspective on building a platform that balances innovation with responsibility. He reflects on the architecture behind Spocto X, the practical challenges of working within regulatory frameworks, and how technologies such as Agentic AI (artificial intelligence) are being applied with care and intent.
1) Let's start at the core. What exactly is Spocto X, and how is it solving rising delinquencies digitally through its platform?
At Spocto, we have spent a lot of time listening to lenders, agents, and borrowers. What we heard was clear: collections for any lender were becoming fragmented with multiple vendors, and multiple channels working independently, harder to manage and ensure adherence to compliance, and slower to adapt to a lender's standards. Field agents, tele-callers, and digital teams were working in silos, reporting was delayed, and that led to delayed response rates and strategies that were implemented just too late. Additionally, the personal data of borrowers was spread across multiple systems across vendors, making it hard to enforce compliance.
Spocto X was built to tackle exactly that. It brings digital, tele-calling, and field operations onto a single platform under the same managerial umbrella using AI-enabled strategies. For us, Spocto X isn't just fixing today's challenges; it's about building a robust system that's ready for what's next.
2) Spocto X is described as an AI that runs your collections like an expert. What has been incorporated in its design to behave like a human counterpart?
Spocto X is designed with Agentic AI at its core. Our AI doesn't just automate routine tasks, but actively learns, adapts, and works with focused goals, much like a human expert. It's spread across every borrower touchpoint, understanding behaviour, choosing the right communication channels, and timing everything just right. It constantly fine-tunes its approach based on what works, so it's always improving. Think of it as a super-efficient assistant, always ready with insights and reports to help streamline and optimise the process.
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With this, we can manage the full debt lifecycle with precision, empathy, and compliance built in throughout the journey to drive optimum outcomes. We're seeing real impact in the numbers: over time, we have steered away over 8.9 crore accounts from becoming non-performing assets (NPAs), thanks to over 21 crore touchpoints enabled through our collections platform, all while maintaining 100% compliance with regulatory standards.
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3) So, Spocto X uses different layers of AI to tackle various challenges—from lender strategy to borrower engagement. How do these layers come together to deliver a seamless experience?
Debt collection is often seen as a challenge, with messages scattered everywhere, calls missed, and agents often working without precise direction. It was easy to feel overwhelmed. That's why at Spocto X, we've decided to change the game with Strat AI, the digital brain behind the platform. Strat AI brings order to this chaos, it figures out the best way to reach each borrower. It tells you what to say, when to say it, and even how intense the communication should be. No more guesswork.
Before any campaign starts, Strat AI sets everything up: who we're reaching out to, what the goals are, and how we'll measure success. Instead of treating everyone the same, it breaks down borrowers into small groups based on their behaviour. This way, the outreach feels much more personal. This way, each layer feeds into the next. Behavioural micro segmentation helps tailor the strategy, and tools such as personalised video or multilingual conversational bots make communication feel local and relatable. As the system learns what's working, it refines its approach automatically. It's a coordinated effort to not just recover more, but to do it with empathy and efficiency, and with minimal human intervention.
4) There has been a lot of conversation about conversational AI and hyper-personalised communication. How do these tools impact collection efficiency?
When it comes to collections, the biggest challenge isn't just reaching people, it's reaching them the right way. Borrowers aren't spreadsheets. Take communication, for example. It's easy to send a text or make a call. However, understanding how to speak, when to reach out, and what matters to someone is much harder. Our conversational AI doesn't just switch languages, it understands context. We have designed it in a way so that it isn't just another generic chatbot; it's been purpose-built for collections use cases. Trained on vast volumes of collection-specific data and keywords, it understands the nuances of borrower conversations and delivers context-aware, effective engagement that outperforms standard conversational AI solutions.
Then there's the human toll on agents themselves. Handling hundreds of tough conversations a day can wear anyone down. Over time, even the best agents can sound transactional or even harsh. Our conversational bots never lose patience. They stay consistent, firm but fair, ensuring borrowers feel respected, no matter how tough the situation gets.
5) Spocto X handles massive scale in both collection volumes and borrower touchpoints. What tech stack enables this kind of performance and reliability?
When you're operating at scale, the real challenge is staying personal without losing efficiency. Spocto X handles that with a cloud-first setup and smart tools built for real-world complexity. For communicating with the borrower, Spocto X uses a combination of AI agents to make every interaction feel thoughtful. Whether it's a conversation in the borrower's language or a video tailored to their situation, these tools understand context, cultural, regional, and even emotional, so the message lands without being insensitive, abrupt, or irrelevant. It's tech designed to make collections more human, not just more automated.
We also rely on real-time data processing, so everything adjusts instantly based on what's happening, and predictive analytics helps us prioritise the right tasks and forecast repayments. Plus, AI-driven compliance tools ensure every communication stays within the regulatory lines, automatically. It's all about combining smart tech that adapts, scales, and keeps things human at the same time. Apart from these, Spocto X is built on solid engineering best practices, the stack is designed for scalability from the ground up; we systematically identify potential points of failure and ensure they are made robust by design.
6) What are some of the most exciting innovations in the Spocto X roadmap for the upcoming year?
In the coming year, Spocto X is doubling down on making the complex parts of debt recovery more manageable. We're working on simplifying legal case management, helping lenders track and process cases more efficiently while offering the flexibility to adapt to how each institution operates. We're also building smarter ways to handle settlements by using machine learning (ML) to help teams make quicker, more consistent decisions, especially in tricky cases like overdue or high-risk accounts.
Asset recovery is another big focus. By digitising that process, we aim to reduce delays and make it easier for everyone involved to stay aligned and accurate. Since external vendors and legal partners play a key role in recovery, we will also add tools that improve how those relationships are managed. Lastly, we're in the process of bringing in voice analytics to better understand conversations, not just what's said, but how it's said. This aims to improve both agent performance and borrower engagement.
Overall, we are heavily invested in AI across multiple components of Spocto X, not just for engineering and collection efficiency improvements, but also for usage by leaders and agents. We will also provide a way for clients to directly interact with our AI.
7) Where do you see AI taking the collections industry in the next three–five years, and how is Spocto X preparing for that future?
In the next three–five years, I think AI will make the collections industry more efficient by helping companies predict borrower behaviour more accurately and personalising interactions. The technology will take over more routine tasks, which will allow agents to focus on the more complex aspects of collections that require human judgment.
At this point, we have hit an inflection point, where adoption of AI is not just an option, but essential to ensure that borrower dignity is maintained.
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At Spocto X, we're focused on preparing for this future by improving our AI Agents, building new agents that will focus on increased collection efficiency, and also enabling clients to engage with our AI solutions. We're working to ensure that our systems engage borrowers most effectively, but most importantly, without losing human empathy, which is the key element towards succeeding in collections. We're also focused on automating several internal tasks that can be done by AI, so that our agents have more time for situations that truly need a personal touch.
Our goal is to make the process smoother, more efficient, and still keep the borrower experience at the centre of everything we do.
Disclaimer - The above content is non-editorial, and TIL hereby disclaims any and all warranties, expressed or implied, relating to it, and does not guarantee, vouch for or necessarily endorse any of the content.
