Helping Lenders Fast Track Digitization Amidst Pandemic: Naveen Kukreja

Lending in India was always set-up in a way that parties in transaction had to meet physically. It could be for signature, income validation, KYC, etc. And, when lockdown happened in March, due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, the industry was fairly unprepared to accept consumers and give them credit products even if they wanted to.

“Till 5-6 years ago, the infrastructure wasn’t there in place and then the lenders started using Aadhar. The not-so-good part about lending is that the industry didn’t use the infrastructure that got created. I think it was more of a regulatory hassle where digital, presence-less KYC was not allowed for lending for the last few years,” Paisabazaar.com Co-Founder and CEO Naveen Kukreja said recently during an interview with ETBFSI series Fintech Diary: Lockdown Special. 

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Kukreja said, a lot of his recent conversations with the lenders are on how to help and fast track the digitization process for banks or NBFCs. In the last 40 days, Paisabazaar has worked on building their digitization capability. 

"We worked on developing video KYC, which got approved by RBI a few months ago, but wasn't actually put into practice on a large scale till now. We have also built capabilities for Aadhar validation & have built the entire e-mandate, e-signature, e-income validation which we are calling as PB Digital Stack for customer on-boarding as per regulatory requirement,” said Kukreja.

FOCUS ON IMPROVING COLLECTIONS

In one of the areas where the lenders are focussing more is collections. Kukreja said, we had a small vertical for collections. People who have received credit scores from us, and where banks had written off their loans, we were speaking to those customers and asking them to pay back their dues to improve their scores. Paisabazaar has scaled up on that front.

“We saw this as an opportunity and have scaled up and the lenders have been pleasantly surprised on how well prepared our call centre was because some of the collection agencies became less effective during this time and we were effective,” he added.

Collection is short-term to medium-term area where Paisabazaar is partnering with banks. “Collections were always a part of the strategy and it got accelerated during the current time,” he added.

(Article edited by: Sunny Lamba)

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