'We Want To Be Amongst First Digital Banks In The Country' Manish Lunia, Co-Founder- Flexiloans.com
Tell us about the concept of FlexiLoans.
FlexiLoans.com was started with the endeavour to provide “Loans at a click” to the unserved and underserved MSME/kirana stores in India. These borrowers were not served by banks and if they were to attempt taking a loan from them, it required heavy documentation, collateral and spending time away from their business where they typically had little help. FlexiLoans.com is solving this problem by providing small business loans PAN India across 1,500+ cities and towns to MSMEs in a 100% digital manner.
It has made a disbursement at a run-rate of Rs 700 crores annually to MSMEs using its in-house full-stack lending platform through 100% digital originations and zero branches.
Our tech and product stack ‘Bi-frost’ connects lenders (including our own NBFC) to vendors that engage with our partner ecosystems across payments, e-commerce, foodtech and others. This is a unique OCEN-like solution that has been built successfully with over 100+ Vendors and 7+ co-lending partners on our proprietary Co-lending solution.
Banks/NBFCs need not integrate with multiple several vendors/ ecosystems but only need to plug into the FlexiLoans.com platform where they can cherry pick the FlexiLoans’ API offerings across:
Likewise vendors can simply on-board the FlexiLoans.com platform and gain access to a selection of Lenders and products. This way, we are partners with the largest E-commerce ecosystems in India for over 5 years now and have extended these partnerships to Payment tech, Foodtech and Pharmtech in the last couple of years.
A few highlights of the impact we’ve made:
48% of the loans are to customer in Tier-II and Tier-III towns. We service 1500+ cities and towns ( One of the largest reach in Fintech ecosystem)
What is the niche market you are looking to address?
Indian MSMEs only obtain 1/7th of their funding from Institutional sources and the rest is met by friends, family, money lenders etc. – which is uncertain and costly.
FlexiLoans.com services the micro businesses in India with a monthly turnover of 4-10 lacs on average. Our partnerships and web interfaces gets over 1,00,000 new loan applications on a monthly basis and our AI/ML technologies processes these are high speed and transparency with over 5000+ data points in the underwriting process real time
So our niche is the segment of micro- entrepreneurs pan India who wish to have unsecured business loans to meet working capital gap seamlessly, adequately and transparently – and that’s a USD 300 bn+ opportunity.
Why will a customer sign up for Flexiloans in an era when banks have gone digital?
Digital is a loosely used word and doesn’t mean having just an online interface. FlexiLoans’ entire purpose is to Source, Process, Underwrite and Service the deserving but underserved customer using digital ML/ AI based models and processing systems. Our systems have continuously stayed cutting edge from customer centricity process and thus large ecosystems like Amazon and multiple banks/ NBFCs integrate with us to service these MSMEs via these digital journeys that we have crafted.
90% of the customers that we serve don’t fit in the traditional banking models and need a very different cash flow based, system based assessments, that we have excelled at.
What is the core-tech stack you are using?
Our In-house developed machine learning technologies can read hundreds of different uploaded documents in seconds and our Credit analytics tool can provide a credit decision real time as well. We also have 20+ proprietary data science assets and 5 patentable algorithms across the loan life cycle.
We have a dedicated ‘Deep Learning and Technology Applications’ team to solve complex problems across image processing, scoring, digital extraction, credit analysis and financial analysis through AI / ML technologies. In fact, 96% of the documents uploaded by customers is classified and tag by our in-house ML engine.
What are some of the new products you are going to launch?
We are seeing significant traction in the B2B BNPL space and are currently piloting our product. We are also seeing incoming inquiries for our SaaS underwriting technology from domestic as well as international markets and this is a business segment we will focus to build upon.
We have added 9-10 very large ecosystem partnerships in the Ecommerce, Foodtech, Pharmatech and Payment tech space in the last 9-12 months and these will drive a significant growth going forward.
~50% of our business is also serviced via our Bi-frost Co-lending platform in partnership with over 7+ Banks/ NBFC partnerships and is witnessing high traction.
What are your plans for Flexiloans in the coming five years?
We want to be amongst the first Digital Banks in the country in the medium to long term. Our partnership, credit and co-lending models are maturing with smart modelling based on thousands of data points which traditional models don’t consider.
We want to be the One point stop for MSMEs for all their financing needs and also facilitate all their transactions – be it accounting, bill payments, tax computations etc. and make him grow smarter and faster.
