SmartCoin The Financial Wellness Platform SmartCoin is one of India's financial wellness platforms addressing credit requirements of the vastly underserved segments in India and partners with customers across their financial lifecycles.
By Kavya Pillai
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SmartCoin is one of India's financial wellness platforms addressing credit requirements of the vastly underserved segments in India and partners with customers across their financial lifecycles. The customer base includes self-employed micro-entrepreneurs, micro-merchants and middle to lower-income salaried individuals unserved by traditional financial institutions.
SmartCoin achieved profitability in FY22 and the brand plans on further building on this trajectory by investing heavily in growth. Its data-driven approach towards ushering financial inclusion for the unserved segments of the Indian population has managed to register rapid growth in their user base.
The concerns SmartCoin set out to address are:
Lack of Data: A significant majority of the Indian working population is employed in the semi-informal sector with lower and volatile earnings, missing formal documentation/proofs and hardly any credit histories. As a result, this segment is blanket labelled as sub-prime, leaving out a high growth potential.
Limited Product Innovation: There has not been adequate 'product' focus and innovation for the mass market. Banking products, be it account, credit, insurance, investment or whether it's being offered to an affluent or an aspiring individual are largely similar in design and process despite significantly diverse needs.
High Distribution Costs: Offline/physical models with manual (or human-centric) processes have been the only way to serve the mass market segment. That coupled with the higher demand for 'sachet' products in this segment (owing to lower income) has created the perception of this segment being unsustainable in terms of distribution costs.
This newfound access to formal credit will benefit over 300 million people from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum by providing them with a slew of empowering prospects that can enhance their lives via financial inclusion.
According to Rohit Garg, CEO and Co-founder of SmartCoin, their tech code ensures "credit access to the underserved segments with cutting-edge tech capabilities that leverage AI and ML algorithms to extend a variety of instant personal loans." "This became possible as our proprietary AI/ML models scan over billions of alternate data points spanning transactional and behavioral attributes to anticipate fraud and default risk to predict the best loan terms suitable to the user's risk profile," he added. The same is reflected in the way the platform extracts text and language in its image processing engines that help build a 360-degree profile of users which is impossible by traditional form-filling approaches. The in-house tech systems comprise full-stack servicing technologies that have been developed internally to ensure a seamless experience in availing credit while supporting the scaling of financial services.
Talking about lessons in entrepreneurial journeys, Garg shared, "the greatest part of our journey has been creating a solid tech product, which has enabled us to remain in touch with the diverse needs of Emerging India and stay close to the customer at all times. India's startup ecosystem is currently booming with plenty of interest from private equity investors and the media. Investors, customers and employees are actively choosing startups over large companies, intrigued by the innovation and ingenuity prevalent." "However, the one thing to keep in mind is that business building is a long-term game. There is a need for individuals to be committed to the core problem their business is out to solve, personal alignment is key to building a successful business," he added.
Since its inception in 2015, SmartCoin has raised 20 Million USD and 15 Million plus app downloads with a team of 300 employees. They are currently working towards ensuring financial inclusion and becoming a one-stop financial wellness platform for Emerging India by partnering with the customer across their financial lifecycle, with products across credit, savings, insurance, financial discipline and planning.
