The three day, Global Fintech Fest concluded on Thursday and acted as a platform for the fintech leaders to come and discuss all about fintech. On the third and final day of the fest, a panel discussion was held on ‘Emerging models on digital onboarding and underwriting for Bharat.’
Gaurish K, Head- Fintech Solutions, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Nakul Jain, MD and CEO, Paytm Payments Services Limited, Anup Nayar, CEO- Domestic, In-Solutions Global, Jay Kotak, Vice President and CO-Head, Kotak 811, Kunal Gothivarekar, country Head- Merchant Acceptance, Fiserv, and Omkar Shirhatti, Chief Product Officer, Perfios, participated in the discussion.
Jay Kotak said, “I think the liability side is one part of it which is, we’re going to talk about the three minute onboarding far more important is democratizing access to credit. There is a lot that needs to be done.”
Kotak further highlighted the steps being taken by his company. “First, at architecture level a lot of effort has been put into effectively delivering assets to the top 100 million Indians, not as much for the next billion and that will become, that’s the centerpiece of what we’re discussing today. Today, you can open a bank account within a few minutes. What we built into that is real-time underwriting capability of being a number of different data files and as the customer is completing his or her bank account journey, you can offer an asset product in real time,” he added.
Talking about credit accessibility on Paytm even for people with no credit history Nakul Jain said, “We just don’t use CIBIL as there are a lot of first time people who take a loan. And that’s built over a similar algorithm, which analyses how their UPI transactions have been, how their pattern of transaction has been on the app. I think that has also allowed them to build their own credit score over a period of time.”
While speaking on government schemes like MGNREGA and ESIC, Omkar Shirhatti stated, “When you look at rural employment, I’m not sure if anybody is tapping into MGNREGA. It’s the largest rural employment guarantee scheme today. Then with ESIC- State Insurance Corporation, every individual working to earn less than ₹15,000 are under ESIC. That’s something which is a powerful resource from a large estate perspective.”
Experience at GFF 2023
Since it was the last day of GFF 2023, the discussion also veered to the experiences of the panelists. For Paytm’s Nakul, there were two clear takeaways. “One was the scale and participation at this event. Secondly, clearly the launches which we saw yesterday, whether it was Lite X or Hello! UPI, they all really showed the power of UPI,” he said.
Sharing his experience, Anup Nayar said, “I mean I have only one word to say. It’s been awesome. The kind of collaborative approach that you see, this is my second GFF with regard to the industry participants, it has truly been at a different scale all together.”
Kunal compared GFF to an annual pilgrimage and said, “I think, post 2016, when we saw fintechs actually growing you first thought maybe it is just a small wave then you saw that, you know, it is almost becoming tsunami and now you feel that it is like ocean like this everywhere, and it is important part of the ecosystem.”