i-exceed Enters Latin America with Appzillon, Targets 50% Growth in 5 Years

i-exceed recently announced its official entry into the Latin American market with its Appzillon digital banking platform, beginning with Peru as the gateway. The Bengaluru-based company has set an ambitious target of achieving up to 50% regional revenue growth within the next five years, driven by large-scale digital banking implementations across the region.

The announcement follows a high-level delegation visit to Peru, led by S. Sundararajan, Co-founder & CEO, Karthik Sivaprakasham, Senior Vice President, and Manuel Velarde, Partner, during which the team engaged with senior leaders from Peru’s financial ecosystem, including the Central Reserve Bank of Peru, and was hosted by His Excellency Ambassador Vishvas Sakpal.

Appzillon, already deployed in projects that have onboarded over 100 million customers globally, integrates low-code development, AI-driven decisioning, and omnichannel digital onboarding while ensuring interoperability with legacy banking systems. With this expansion, i-exceed aims to bring its India-tested playbook of scale, speed, and financial inclusion to Latin America.

In this conversation with CiOL, S. Sundararajan, CEO, discusses how i-exceed is approaching digital banking expansion in Latin America, the challenges banks face, and the role of AI and low-code platforms in accelerating financial inclusion.

How are digital banking platforms accelerating financial inclusion and expanding access to underserved communities across Latin America?

I have witnessed how thoughtfully designed digital banking platforms can extend financial access to communities long overlooked by traditional banking. Lightweight, mobile-first delivery, simplified onboarding, and alternative channels like USSD, agent networks, and QR wallets make basic financial services affordable to populations that were previously uneconomic to serve. i-exceed’s Appzillon digital banking platform, being low-code and designed for rapid delivery, helps banks bring these services into underserved communities through features including multilingual access. In India, the India Post Payments Bank case shows Appzillon-based digital services being used with the postal network to onboard over 30 million customers in 18 months, enabling efficient account opening, e-KYC, and offline capabilities in rural and low-connectivity areas. Such examples around the world show fintech growth is strongly correlated with regulatory modernisation and open-finance frameworks that allow new business models.

Platforms that embed identity capture, document processing, and basic decision-making accelerate account opening and responsible credit access while lowering unit costs for banks. In Latin America, the real acceleration in financial inclusion comes when banks scale digital platforms that are adaptable, compliant, and deeply integrated with local ecosystems. While the technology is a critical enabler, sustained impact requires aligning innovation with regulatory frameworks and community trust.

What key challenges do banks and fintechs face in balancing innovation, cybersecurity, and compliance with evolving regulations in the region?

Balancing innovation, cybersecurity and compliance in Latin America is primarily a leadership and execution challenge. Rapid fintech expansion broadens the attack surface, elevating fraud, phishing and API misuse, while varied regulatory expectations add operational friction for firms scaling across borders. The pragmatic response is to embed security and compliance into product lifecycles, not bolt them on later. Begin with early threat modelling, enforce API governance and strong digital identity/KYC, preserve immutable audit logs, and separate duties through clear role controls. Validate controls in regulatory sandboxes or through staged rollouts before full-scale launches. Sustaining momentum requires a risk-based posture supported by measurable security and compliance KPIs, disciplined release gates, and ongoing engagement with regulators. Prioritising outcome-focused metrics and predictable funding for resilience sustains development velocity while containing systemic risk.

How do you see AI-driven personalisation and predictive analytics transforming customer engagement and loyalty in Latin American digital banking?

AI-driven personalisation and predictive analytics will shift engagement from episodic transactions to continuous, value-led relationships. In Latin America’s mobile-first markets, relevance and timing become the competitive edge. A bank that can predict intent and act within the customer journey can easily increase activation rates, deepen wallet share and materially reduce churn. Real gains depend on three factors — trustworthy data, rigorous governance, and explainable models that meet evolving regulator expectations and preserve customer trust. Operationalising these capabilities requires embedding analytics into onboarding, product recommendation and risk workflows so insights influence decisions in real time. The winners will not be those who pilot isolated use cases but platforms that prove measurable uplifts in conversion, retention and cost-to-serve and that demonstrate clear auditability and ethical controls. That combination turns relevance into durable loyalty.

With open banking and real-time payments gaining traction, how are institutions preparing their infrastructure for secure, API-led interoperability?

Institutions are preparing by building API-first architectures, adopting shared standards for data formats and consent, and upgrading payment rails to support instant or near-instant settlements. Real-time payment systems in countries like Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Peru are driving expectations among retail consumers and businesses alike. According to Mastercard’s analysis, open banking in Latin America is now intertwined with real-time payments—they are complementary rather than separate trends. i-exceed supports this evolution via Appzillon's composable banking capabilities to allow banks to plug into external systems securely without disrupting core operations. Secure interoperability emerges when consent, identity, data protection, and audit governance are embedded into APIs and when institutions adopt modular platforms rather than rigid monoliths.

How is Appzillon’s low-code, composable architecture helping i-exceed integrate with legacy banking systems while scaling across diverse Latin American markets?

The strength of Appzillon lies in its composable, modular design and low-code tools which greatly reduce the friction of integrating with varied legacy systems. Legacy systems often differ from bank to bank and even branch to branch. By separating the core execution engine from the front end, using adapters, service meshes and API layers, banks in Latin America can pilot new customer journeys and innovate regionally. They can even localise without rewriting entire back-end stacks. This architecture enables i-exceed to reuse modules—notification hubs, payment hubs, OCR, and chatbots—across markets; it enables scaling while managing risk. The result: deployments can be replicated with required localisation (language, payment rail, regulation) without starting from zero each time.

How will Appzillon’s capabilities and i-exceed strategic partnerships support its expansion goal of achieving 50% revenue growth in Latin America over the next five years?

Growth of that magnitude must rest on three foundations: product strength, clear value for customers, and leverage through local partnerships. Appzillon’s speed-to-market through low-code, its composable reusable modules, and built-in AI give customers visible wins like faster onboarding, lower cost-to-serve, and higher engagement. i-exceed’s strategy to partner with regional fintech integrators, payments providers, regulatory bodies and ecosystem players ensures that product-deployment cycles shorten, trust builds, and sales scale. With open banking and real-time payments gaining strength, platforms that are ready to integrate, secure, and localise will be prime beneficiaries. If execution remains disciplined—with pilots, measurable ROI and partner-led scaling of deployments—then achieving ambitious growth becomes plausible rather than just aspirational.