Transforming consumer lending: Ensuring financial wellness

Becoming a financial platform of choice that underserved India counts on is an uphill effort. But one that is brimming with potential for shared prosperity for the people of India and the players operating in the sector.  

As a brand SmartCoin has been a flagbearer of financial inclusion that combines deep understanding of its discerning customer segment and unmatched tech capabilities to bring products that are just right for Emerging India to take the big leap towards financial freedom and empowerment.  

The opportunity landscape  

Access to financial services is crucial for economic growth and has been promoted by the United Nations as fundamental in eradicating poverty and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.  

India, particularly, has been one of the developing countries that has seen the most widespread digital adoption and usage of mobile applications. However, India’s struggle with credit access and financial literacy remains prevalent among the Emerging segment, the proliferation of digital notwithstanding.  

Financial services is one of the largest contributors to our nation’s GDP. Within that, this segment is substantial in terms of size (300M+) and largely untapped by formal institutions. We are at the cusp of a digital revolution for Emerging India and this is the perfect time to scale fast and lead the building of an inclusive financial wellness platform for the hitherto unserved.  

SmartCoin: Bridging key gaps in the lending ecosystem  

SmartCoin came into being to address a gaping hole in the finance ecosystem. Our mission is to drive financial wellness for Emerging India through enabling access to personalized and affordable digital financial products and PFM tools leveraging data-driven advanced AI/ML-based innovations. 

We are solving for the above gaps by: 

 1. Leveraging alternate data & AI/ML capabilities 

2. Creating personalized ‘sachet’ products 

3. Building a highly scalable model 

4. Delivering superior customer experience through 100% digital & paperless distribution  

5. Partnering the entire financial life of customers 

Rohit Garg
CEO & Co-Founder
SmartCoin

Building products for the Next Billion  

Our tech capabilities have helped us re-engineer the entire lending lifecycle to create a 100% digital, paperless and automated mobile app that enables Emerging India to avail capital for a variety of use cases in a safe and swift way. The consumer insight has helped us create India’s most advanced credit underwriting engine tested over 10 M+ users, 140B+ data-points and build for the entire financial lifecyle of our consumers.  

Making tech work for Emerging India 

Our tech team has never lost sight of a few objectives, including ensuring that decisions made by our AI/ML models are explainable, transparent and fair, while focusing on making the AI systems human-centric.  

 Our in-house tech systems comprise full-stack servicing technologies that have been developed internally to not only ensure swift, seamless experience in availing credit but also support the scaling of our financial services with minimum opex.  

We have spearheaded a breakthrough within the consumer lending ecosystem by unlocking the power of AI to digitize and streamline operations such as: 

1. Delinquency prediction 

2. Fraud detection 

3. Income prediction 

4. SMS/bank parsing and categorisation 

5. Collection scorecard 

6. Assisted customer support (chat/onboarding)  

7. Operational cost optimisations 

Measuring our impact 

  1. Trusted by 15 M+ Indians and we have disbursed ~Rs 2,500 crores in loans so far
  2. Re-engineered the loan lifecycle to make it 100% automated, digitized and paperless, reducing our operating costs drastically vs. banks
  3. Created a dynamic and scalable technology infrastructure, with provisions to handle 10x growth/traffic of what exists.
  4. Served over 19,000+ pin codes across the entire nation
  5. Maintained our CSAT (customer satisfaction index) at 4/5. 

Defining our progress 

We brought in a transitory shift in the way that the mid and lower income segment, deemed ‘risky’ by traditional finance institutions, access credit. Our Tech for Good and Financial Inclusion efforts have been recognized at several prestigious platforms including: 

  1. The World Economic Forum
  2. NASSCOMM 
  3. Google LaunchPad 
  4. IFC 
  5. Financial Express 

The future we are looking at 

The uniqueness that we bring to the table is a sharp focus on our platform play. We have never viewed our credit product in isolation. Leveraging customer trust and data-driven insights to serve customers’ entire financial needs has always been top of mind for us. This customer-focused approach will continue to serve us in strengthening engagement and raising the barriers for competition in competing against our personalized product portfolio. 

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ET Edge Insights, its management, or its members

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