By Abhinay Kumar
Digitalisation is the new normal. From buying breakfast to reading books, everything can be done online. Working on the same lines, Ahmedabad-based startup Online PSB Loans (PSBLoansin 59Minutes.com) is a new and unique player in the game of digital finance. It is working towards 100% digitalisation of the lending process for both borrowers and lenders. Despite constantly being told to move to technical hubs like Bengaluru and Chennai the management of the company is proud of deciding against it and are successfully operating from Ahmedabad.
Ronak Shah, the co-founder and COO of Online PSB Loans, said, “We help the financial institutions to digitise their loan disbursement process by providing them fintech solutions like digital onboarding, risk scoring and assessment, credit underwriting, API infrastructure and management. Under this process the data is collected directly from the source and then it is analysed by the system that provides 100% transparency.”
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Ronak further said, “The company has processed more than 7 lakh loan proposals (excluding the loan renewals, which are around 7.5 lakh) in the last five years. We work with agility and speed and the loans get disbursed within two to four days. The public sector banks and private sector banks are the shareholders of the company which include SIDBI, State Bank of India, HDFC Ltd and TransUnion CIBIL.”
Commenting on the scope and reason behind the idea, Jinand Shah, MD and CEO of Online PSB Loans, said, “There are more than seven crore MSMEs in India and only two lakh bank branches to cater financial services throughout the country. In this case, it becomes very hard for banks to process all the loan requests manually, so there comes OPL. Right now, around 1.2 crore of these seven crore MSMEs, that are registered under GST, can avail of our services. For rest we are creating a database that will work on the basis of GST, ITR or bank statements. We started our business for the loan band of Rs 10 lakh-Rs 1 crore and now we have expanded it to Rs 10,000 -Rs 50 crore.”
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On future plans and new services, the COO of OPL said, “We have already launched FIT Rank and are planning to launch GST-Sahay. These will make it even more easy for MSMEs to avail of financial services from banks. FIT is a first-of-a-kind ranking system for MSMEs. It functions using AI and ML. It analyses various data sets for MSMEs and predicts the possibility of an MSME becoming a NPA. While the GST-Sahay will facilitate cash flow-based lending to MSMEs capitalising GST data, bank statements and Bureau data”.
According to Jinand Shah, the company has processed a loan amount of Rs 1,32,000 crore and Rs 74,000 crore have been disbursed as loans in the last five years. Further it should be kept in mind that the NPA percentage for digital loans is significantly low. For the loans through the digital infrastructure, the NPA percentage has been less than 1% while for manually processed loans it has been 8-12%.”