Technology has found a home in every industry. In other words, the world can’t operate without it today. Every task, in essence, depends on it. Hence, it is not surprising to see technology paving its way into financial services. Fintechs are creating a revolution by replacing the traditional financial processes.
The world is a wonderful place to live. Every city has its unique history, and Chennai is no exception. It is a thriving and popular Indian metropolitan city with beautiful traditions, incredible architecture, and amazing people. The city, most importantly, is anchored economically and has advanced in sectors such as software development, medicines, finance, hardware manufacturing, and textiles. In terms of start-ups, Chennai has seen massive growth, placing the city in 102nd place on Global startup Ecosystem Index. Thus, in turn, we see a tremendous rise in fintechs too.
We combined a list of fintechs that exists in Chennai. Keep reading to know more!
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Monexo is an RBI-registered P2P lending marketplace for personal loans. It brings borrowers needing credit for businesses, individual needs, and lenders to invest in SMEs. The company operates on a 100% online platform. Recently, they have launched a digital investment app that enables investors to earn 13% per annum on their investments and, in turn, beat inflation. The 13% earnings are two times more than FD returns in any financial institution. “The app also is a way to build credible credit scores by farmers, students, women entrepreneurs and salaried employees with affordable loans.” says company CEO Mukesh Bubna.
DigiMoney Finance, founded by Boobalan Madhavan and Gorav Gupta, is an innovative technology-based fintech and RBI-licensed NBFC lending solution for individuals and small and medium businesses owners seeking private finance, a combination that enhances customer journey. As a company run by professionals from the financial services industries, its mission is to make private financing accessible, 24/7, all 365 days with utmost convenience and speed, making “Lending as a Service”. The exciting fact about DigiMoney is they can disburse a loan in less than 10 minutes. They have processed more than 100,000 loan applications till date. Moreover, their mobile app has more than 100,000 downloads on Google Play. DigiMoney Finance Team has also been recently facilitated by ‘the Honourable Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu Thiru MK Stalin’ in the TN Investor Conclave for their achievement in the Fintech Space.
Finequs (recently rebranded from Finolet) is leveraging technology with leading banks, lenders and financial institutions to provide financial products to every nook and corner of India. The company’s primary work is to make retail outlets as loan enablers. The financial products that they are focusing on are loans, credit cards and insurance, and introducing more financial products in the future. It has 65+ lending partners, concentrating on providing simple and convenient access to credit products for various credit categories. For making an impact in Indian society through Finequs’ financial inclusivity, the Founder and CEO of Finequs, Krishnan Vaidyanathan, has been featured as “The People’s Banker” in Forbes India’s March’21 edition.
M2P Fintech, co-founded by Madhusudanan R, Prabhu Rangarajan and Muthukumar A, is a world leader in embedded financial infrastructure and serves as a trustworthy tech layer between banks, aspiring fintechs, and other financial institutions. With various solutions in Payments, Lending, and Banking, M2P products assist banks, NBFCs, and internet businesses in entering the market. They have a market presence in more than 11 countries. They have so far completed transactions totalling $10 billion, formed 500+ fintech partnerships, issued 18% of new credit-linked cards, and signed up more than 4,00,00+ digital merchants for QR and UPI payments.
Northern Arc Capital is a financial services platform that offers a broad range of technologically-based solutions to meet the credit needs of emerging markets and small companies. Ashish Mehrotra was recently appointed as MD and CEO in April 2022. Since the launch of its platform in 2009, the business has collectively raised more than INR 1 trillion for its clients. As of March 2021, Northern Arc’s exposure was dispersed across 657 districts in 28 states and 7 union territories in India. It has given out about 6 million loans to retail consumers, including loans to people, households, and small enterprises. They have impacted the lives of 54 million people and enabled finance worth $95 million. Currently, there are more than 225 client partners and 900+ investors.
For companies that receive and accept payments from their clients and suppliers, Ippo Pay serves as a payment aggregator. It offers comprehensive technology that allows for accepting any kind of payment for both offline and online businesses. Founded by Mohan K and Jai Kumar, the company specifically targets small enterprises, independent contractors, home-based business owners, women entrepreneurs, and merchants in India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns to offer regular support and management in their chosen language. It has onboarded about 75000 merchants, among that 65000 are currently active. It has raised funds worth $2.3 million from Better, Coinbase and Blume.
StuCred is an online platform founded by Henna Jain Tatia and Jaijash Tatia, empowering the students of India by offering quick, short-term and interest-free loans. Till date, over 2 L+ students have used their services, and they have collaborated with 7000+ colleges in the country. Recently, they introduced the StuCred Score feature into the app, designed to track students’ financial behaviour. The students can now evaluate their financial capability and improve their financial habits.
Oro Corp, headquartered in Chennai, is the fintech platform for achieving the dreams of people through gold loans by partnering with various financial institutions like Federal Bank, Sunita Finlease, Fincare Small Finance Bank, and The New India Assurance Co Ltd. It unlocks the potential value of people’s gold to provide greater access and the right information at the lowest possible cost. You can get instant gold loans with Oro Money offering the highest per-gram gold rate and lower interest rates. At present, the company is able to disburse gold loans to 2000+ people, has INR 100 cr assets under management, is able to save INR 20 cr of interest and expanded its operation in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune as well. Oro Safe is another product of Oro Corp, which provides safety deposit locker services, ensuring the utmost safety, privacy and customer experience for people to keep their physical gold. Rakesh Mani is the current CEO and one of the founders of the company. The other founders are Sreekesh Krishnan and Parth Shah.
Habile Technologies is a fintech company that provides technological solutions to financial institutions such as NBFCs, MFIs and Fintechs in 9 countries. Habile’s product, CloudBankin, is a cloud-based SaaS lending platform that handles the complete end-to-end loan origination to the recovery process. Their customers are able to disburse a loan in 7.5 minutes. They have served 35+ clients till date. In fact, DigiMoney is one of their clients. Financial institutions manage their loan portfolio in a paperless manner using their product. Interestingly, the core team members of Habile, Mani Parthasarathy, Rajah, Palanisami Muthusamy, Hariharan Govindraju and Alex Lawrence, passed out from the same college, Madras Institute of Technology, in 2006.
We hope you enjoyed reading about the fintechs in Chennai and learning how they’re changing people’s lives. More fintechs are coming up on the list. If we missed out on any fintech, please share them with us. Don’t forget to stay tuned for more blogs!
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(Formerly known as Habile Technologies)
After smartphone penetration, people are not watching their SMS at all. They use SMS only for OTP related transactions. That’s it.
But What can a Lender see in your SMS after you consent to them?
Lender can see income, expenses, and any other Fixed Obligation like (EMIs/Credit Card).
1) Income – Parameters like Average Salary Credited, Stable Monthly inflows like Rent
2) Expenses – Average monthly debit card transactions, UPI Transactions, Monthly ATM Withdrawal Amount etc
3) Fixed Obligations – Loan payments have been made for the past few months, Credit card transactions.
It also tells the Lender the adverse incidents like
1) Missed Loan payments
2) Cheque bounces
3) Missed Bill Payments like EB, LPG gas bills.
4) POS transaction declines due to insufficient funds.
A massive chunk of data is available in our SMS (more than 700 data points), which helps Lender to make a credit decision.
An interesting insight on vehicle loans for lenders.
A trend we are seeing today – the first-hand vehicle ownership is decreasing with time. Why? People are upgrading their vehicles in every few years because of technological advances. And, this can be seen more with the millennial generation.
So, what should a lender do in terms of financing?
– Estimating the residual value of the vehicle at the start of the financing period.
– Charging a borrower only for the residual value (which is the difference between the value after a few years and the current value)
Example: A bike currently is INR 1 lakh. You want to buy the vehicle for 2 years. A lender will estimate the residual value of that bike today and what it would be after 2 years. If the estimated residual value = INR 45,000, the lender will charge you only that (say, INR 55,000 with interest for this instance) during your tenure.
At the end of 2-year period, you have 3 choices:
1. Return the bike and upgrade to a new one without going through the struggle of selling it.
2. Pay the lump sum remaining amount to own the vehicle outright.
3. Extend the financing and own it by keep paying the EMIs for the remaining amount of the vehicle for the next 12 or 18 months.
Benefits for the borrowers?
– Flexibility to use a vehicle and upgrade to a new one.
– Affordability to not pay for the complete value of the vehicle with the intention to use for a lesser amount of time.
– Convenience in owning the vehicle.
Say goodbye to the old lending option and embrace the new way of financing for vehicle by lenders!
How many of us know this?
1) Tiktok does Lending ( is it an entertainment company or social media company or a fintech company?
2) Youtube China does Lending
3) Top 100 internet companies in China(no matter what business they are in) do Lending
The team which was heading Lending in Tiktok was the Advertisement team. If we do Ads, we do X no of revenue. But if we do lending, we’ll get X+30% more revenue. This is on the same Ad spot.
Ad team has transformed into a lending team, and in today’s world, it’s possible because the subject matter expertise can be put in as an API and given to you.
Embedded Lending as a service is becoming popular in India too, and I am happy to be part of this ecosystem.
The answer is No. Only the top 10 crore people have access to many credit products in India. Almost all Banks focus on this market.
Once you go beyond that, the credit access rate has dropped significantly due to multiple factors.
1) Customers who are having low income(30-40K per month)
2) Not earning from an employer who belongs to Category A or B
3) Not from Tier 1 or 2 cities
NBFCs and Fintechs focus on the above segment, pushing another 10 crores of people.
But in India, 70 crores more people are formally or informally employed, which still needs to be tapped.