The new age of lending: Interview with Ramit Arora – President & Co-Founder of Biz2Credit

By Leandra Monteiro

In the last 2 years, the lending business in India has undergone a digital transformation. The transformation is driven by the need for superior customer experience, emerging business models, faster turn-around time, and adoption of contemporary technology like cloud, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

IBS Intelligence in conversation with The new age of lending: Interview with Ramit Arora – President & Co-Founder of Biz2Credit discusses the potential of the digital lending market in India and the lending industry’s forecast for the year ahead.

What is the story behind the inception of Biz2credit and how has the journey been so far?

Biz2Credit is a digital-first provider of small business funding. It leverages data, cash flow insights, and the latest technologies to give business owners an automated small business funding platform. Biz2Credit was incorporated with a motive to make business finance work seamlessly. Biz2Credit has been the most sorted yet professional platform for small businesses to get funding online. Its mission is to provide small businesses with the best technologically backed funding options for their project or capital needs that are easy to understand and access. Biz2X is the natural outgrowth of Biz2Credit’s established platform software that brands like HSBC, Oriental Bank, and TATA Capital have chosen to launch new online lending initiatives. Biz2Credit has been perfecting and optimizing its online lending platform since 2007 for over a million small business customers.

What global market is the company present in and what do they aim to achieve within those markets?

As of today, Biz2X is adopted by more than 40 banks globally. Some of our customers include HSBC, Citibank, Tata Capital, etc. We are also expanding aggressively by providing the Biz2X platform to Fintechs and innovative startups. Thus, the platform is scalable and has been successfully adopted across all sizes of organizations offering various types of products and having dynamic business models. Biz2X is currently in talks with banks in South East Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle East. These relationships will be ready to be announced at the beginning of 2023.

What has been the response of Indians towards digital lending?

Digital lending is on the rise spree in India and has the potential to revolutionize credit disbursal by reducing costs for banks. However, there is also a rising trend of illegal and unsecured lending apps that require regulators’ attention. India’s lending space is witnessing a technological shift with loans increasingly being disbursed through digital means. Over the last 2 years, banks, NBFCs and other financial institutions have inclined more towards digital lending solutions due to faster turnaround times, mitigating manual interventions and capturing a wider customer base.

How do you foresee the next decade of digital lending in India?

Digital Lending will dominate the financial sector in the near future and will compete with the much more Formal Banking Sector head-on. There is already an Open Banking scenario and Neo Banking which is due to the lack of regulatory leeway collaborating with the Banks.

Some of the leading Neo Banks have already created a large Customer base and this Customer base is highly loyal to them. Today Banks are relying on Customer inertia to abandon the Formal Banking Services; this exit barrier will keep diminishing to the point of inflexion where formal Banking Structures will become redundant in the world.

What’s in the pipeline for 2022 and beyond?

We have started 2021 with some exciting launches starting with the launch of our middleware platform “Maadhyam”. Maadhyam facilitates financial success, streamlines the credit gap and addresses the issue of the monetary arrangement and access faced by MSMEs. We are aiming to invest US$25 million over the next 3 years to grow and strengthen Maadhyam.

Not stopping there, we are also coming with a new fintech product “NBFC-in-a-Box” a plug and play business model that unifies various processes in the digital lending journey by offering application monitoring, loan underwriting, customer management, risk assessment to banks and lenders thereby easing the entire loan lending process.

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