SlicePay, a Buy Now Pay Later startup which enables college students to avail everyday products and services at flexible monthly payments has now grown to 120+ colleges in just 9 months with over 10K+ active transactions, number of transactions for which customers still have an outstanding amount to be paid to SlicePay, at a $2mn+ annual runrate. This is a huge shift in payments considering only till last year these buyers were using traditional ways to shop or were dependent on their parents for everyday needs. Keeping in mind the 35 million college students in the country companies like SlicePay bring a self-dependent way of shopping for a long uncatered segment.
"We want to revolutionize the way India pays by extending Indians a single line of credit in the long run. We have started with an early adopter generation of college students who are most frequent shoppers and a good demographic to build this infrastructure on before we scale up with millennials and then others. For college students, the options seem limited a lot of times when it comes to credit since banks and NBFCs have declared their case hopeless. So when we underwrite that risk due to our advanced processes, we acquire a customer for long term.",
says Rajan Bajaj, Co-founder & CEO, SlicePay.It's more than e-commerceMoving beyond just e-commerce SlicePay has an offline payment system where students in partner colleges can pay for their everyday spends in canteens, stationeries etc via SlicePay and repay back everything at the end of month. It's called 'Go cashless with SlicePay' and college students seem to like it a lot. 'It helps me get rid of the everyday hassle to produce cash everytime I feel hungry or anytime I need a pen. I can just use SlicePay and buy it and pay later when I have money.', says John, a third year college student at Acharaya Institute of Technology.
Apart from going offline, SlicePay also offers services like recharging your online wallets for emergency cash or phone recharges and purchasing GRE/GMAT preparation packages in easy monthly plans after a tie up with BYJU's, a leader in online preparation materials for students who want to pursue higher education. In the coming months SlicePay plans to launch payments for movie ticket bookings and car rentals directly via the SlicePay app.
What are they solving?A major pain point when it comes to solving such a prevalent problem amongst the youth is their understanding of the credit industry. The downside is half knowledge. So when a student only knows the consequences of a bad credit situation they tend to move away from it rather than also try to be aware of the positives of it. Which is why it is absolutely necessary for students to get aware on what credit is, what interest are they borrowing money on, why do they need to repay on time and so on. SlicePay also focuses on educating its users the pros & cons and ensures users who have a due date approaching are duly reminded of it through mails/SMS or social media. Timely repayment also helps them in making a good CIBIL Score which in turn helps in availing faster big ticket size loans in future faster than their peers who are new to credit.
Another bottleneck that the company faces is the time taken in approval process (which generally takes 2-3 days) and waiting period for any user. Point to note here is until you are approved for a shopping limit you cannot in actuality buy anything via SlicePay. Since disbursing credit comes along with major risks, it's a necessity to correctly analyse the creditworthiness of each student who gains this power. By capturing metrics often left out by banks and other institutions and analysing them through it's credit risk engine, SlicePay aims to give a better risk assessment of it's target audience which is necessary for correctly identifying risk areas. This information intake is what takes most time. Users often tend to ask why such and such information is needed and the simple answer is this risk assessment.
As Deepak, another of the two co-founder's puts it, "Students need to realise that this is a one time thing and this is a risk at our end, so once a user is approved, we make sure the experience makes up for it."
Dreaming BigWith its well proven model of disbursing credit to college students in Bangalore and growing data to analyse usage and student behaviour, SlicePay is looking ahead to take this to more cities in India, starting with Delhi, Mumbai & Hyderabad. It aims to capture the 35 million college student market in the country and fill the gap students encounter while paying for their needs.
Leveraging the already established spending capabilities and the infrastructure which supports it, SlicePay plans to be present as a source of credit in every channel where millennials spend and help them make their college life easier via smart use of credit. Not to forget their credit scores still stand and help them in their financial future.
Riding on the fin-tech ecosystem in India which is poised to grow to a $10 Billion industry by 2020, SlicePay aims to witness major growth in the years to come. In an era of limited credit options for millennials, SlicePay moves to revolutionize future banking and credit risk assessment via non-traditional data capture and analytics, impacting our youth like never before.
