What is your venture/Startup about?
LoanAdda is a fintech company that uses disruptive technology to stratify lenders with borrowers with a focus on Priority Sector Lending. We facilitate customized loans for businesses and individuals with limited banking access. The company hopes to improve the financial inclusion situation in India and promote hassle-free access to loan disbursement across the subcontinent. It delivers a range of financial services with an emphasis on thin file consumers by using big data analytics and artificial intelligence to connect them to the right lender, using handholding approach at each step to simplify consumer experience.
Tell us about the founders
Anshuman Mishra- Anshuman Mishra is the Founder and CEO at LoanAdda; an online aggregator that provides customized financial requirements for those who have limited banking access. As Founder and CEO, his chief responsibilities involve looking over the sales and operations of the company. His vast skillset includes financial modeling & valuation, business strategy development and asset management.
With over 15 years of professional experience across banking, Consulting, Retail and venture capital sector, Anshuman decided to embark into the sphere of online loan market and ideated LoanAdda. Based in New Delhi, Anshuman earned his MBA – Finance from IIFT and later earned a 1 yr general management degree from INSEAD, Paris.
Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service
LoanAdda uses big data analytics and artificial intelligence to connect borrowers to an appropriately matched lender, using a personalized approach at each step to simplify the consumer experience. LoanSwift (LoanAdda’s proprietary software) has modules, which take more than 100 data points including both traditional and non-traditional parameters. The customer can apply for and track the progress of their application both on the app and web platform. LoanAdda helps the customer throughout the entire process from identifying necessary requirements, processing loan applications, and picking up documents until successful loan disbursal.
What inspired you to build the above product/ service?
It came as a shock to me one day, when a loan application of mine got rejected. It was a long tedious process to figure out why this had happened, only to find numerous credit requests in my CIBIL report that I had never made. This got me thinking about the non-transparent financial structure in our country. At LoanAdda, we have focused on transparency right till the end for every customer. Adda means friendly neighborhood advice with no strings attached and we initially intended only that.
What was the most challenging part of your journey till now? How did you overcome these challenges ?*
An entrepreneur, who owns a company faces more difficulties in taking a loan for personal use than even his own employees applying for a loan to the same financial institution. This is because the Indian banking landscape is still reeling under corporate and SME NPAs. The PSU banks which were the original opinion formulator for creditworthiness have always shunned the 5.5 cr SMEs in India for any form of credit. What we do see is that retail loan portfolio of all banks and financial institutions are increasing. Secondly, the financial landscape is fast changing; we face the challenges of Indian banking sector being analog. Infact no bank does online credit decision making and there are no standardized processes that can be fed into a program. So we’re ever evolving our algorithm based on small nuances that we find with each case we do. We aim to make a seamless technology based decision for credit.
How you think your startup/venture could change the society/industry.*
There are 456M Indians living without access to any formal sources of credit . The biggest problem is limited access to credit for unbanked customers and poor guidance in facilitating loans. Although more than 50% of Indian adults hold an account with a financial institution, only about 6% of them have borrowed from a formal institution.
With high entry barriers to formal banking and lack of education adding to their woes, these customers remain outside the periphery, pushing them deeper into poverty. This problem is further aggravated by the fact that customers usually do not know which lender would be the best fit for their profile , going from pillar to post to get a loan. Our proprietary algorithm integrates the credit parameters of all major banks/ NBFC’s with the customers credit profile to arrive at the best fit option.
We have till date disbursed loans in the range of 50k to 5.5cr, the latter being India’s single largest online mortgage loan.
Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business till now. *
LoanAdda has raised a seed round of $ 0.5 Mn
What are your plans for next 3 years?
We aim to process disburse loans from our own portal and also expand our aggregation business. We plan to process 300,000 applications in the next 6 months, and 8,000 cr loans disbursed in next 5 years, as our algorithm has capacity to process upto 50,000 applications a day.