The BFSI industry has evolved as a result of digitalisation and numerous other advancements, as financial institutions have gained instant access to actionable insights, in real-time, besides a clear competitive edge and enhanced user experience. To understand more about the initiatives taken to propel digitisation, Srajan Agarwal of Elets News Network (ENN) interacted with Sonal Mehta, Senior Vice President, Resurgent India Limited.
1) What measures is Resurgent India taking to help BFSI go digital?
A key challenge financial institutions face is the lack of automation in screening financial and non-financial documents and data. To bridge the credit gap of $500 billion in consumer and SME financing, we need to increase the turn-around time (TAT), remove human checks to minimise operational and fraud risk, and develop customisable scorecards. At ScoreMe, we have helped lenders, credit rating agencies, and other financial institutions in simplifying the processing of unstructured data in multiple formats, increasing operational efficiency and enhancing transparency in lending decisions.
Regardless of whether you are a bank, NBFC, fintech lender, or aggregator, we can assist you in developing standardised or bespoke models based on your needs, allowing you to gain deeper insights into your borrower base.
Our subject matter specialists have created intuitive, AI-driven, automated tools like bank statement analyser and GSTR analyser. Bank statement analyser, for instance, examines bank-specific narrations, layouts, and logics and is designed to support major international banks, leading cooperative banks, public sector banks, and private sector banks. It screens a proposal in its early stages, generates an unbiased assessment of the potential borrower credit worthiness and periodically analyses the financial dealings of your current borrowers.
2) Could you elaborate on the key focus areas of Resurgent India?
We provide customised solutions for assorted merchant and investment banking services from the ground up. Resurgent has offices across India, including ones in Gurgaon, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Jaipur and has put in place an on-the-ground talent pool of more than 200 professionals to help businesses manage their changing needs.
Our service offerings, as a category 1 merchant banker, include mergers and acquisitions, private equity, debt solutions, structured finance, capital market solutions, transaction advisory, valuations, government advisory, enterprise risk, stressed asset resolution, fintech solutions, training and a few other areas. We advise on transactions in the order of Rs.22,000 crore annually across sectors like highways, real estate, power, renewable energy, logistics, consumer goods, agriculture, packaging, auto, healthcare, etc.
We are empaneled with all state-run & large private banks for conducting TEV Studies. We are also knowledge partners of several industry bodies, including CII, ASSOCHAM and ICC. Resurgent has published more than 60 knowledge papers on different sectors of the economy and has also organised 116 webinars. Our holding company and fintech ScoreMe administers paperless credit and analytics for banks, NBFCs and credit rating agencies. We have come up with cutting-edge tools to help financial institutions conduct comprehensive analyses and appraise the creditworthiness of borrowers.
3) What are the key adaptations followed in the BFSI sector in the past 5 years?
Banks and financial institutions have weathered the pandemic well. Financial institutions are well capitalised and will hold up well under a variety of recovery scenarios.
Growing demand, in recent years, from customers for digital banking services has put artificial intelligence and machine learning at the centre of the banking industry’s evolution. These innovations have increased automation and, when used after taking risks into account, typically outperform human decision-making abilities in terms of accuracy and speed.
The BFSI industry has evolved as a result of digitalisation and numerous other advancements, as financial institutions have gained instant access to actionable insights, in real-time, besides a clear competitive edge and enhanced user experience. Further, payment innovations have strengthened the digital ecosystem while fulfilling a fundamental social need — contactless cards have provided a more hygienic, quick and easy method of payment.
Likewise, open banking has transformed online payments and has allowed banks to offer their services to customers across platforms for simple payments by collaborating with fintech companies. Banks now provide a single interface, by integrating their financial services into software developed by third parties, through which clients can access their services.
4) What strategies did Resurgent India establish to stay ahead of its competitors?
I believe, our deep moorings in financial analysis and technology have lent us a distinct vantage point over the investment banking and corporate finance landscape in India. We are uniquely qualified to advise clients on financial, technological and operational challenges with ScoreMe augmenting our domain experience and our diversified portfolio helping us understand investor perspectives and their ever-evolving needs on a wide range of issues.
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Our deep and extensive relation across all levels in PSBs and private sector banks have helped us bring about great efficiencies in our service delivery. We work with some of the best-known clients in the industry and have carried out more than 750 transactions across multiple sectors. Our team has established a network with major private equity funds, banks, and financial institutions. We have considerable experience and capabilities in capital syndication, valuations, and transaction execution skills. ScoreMe, in like manner, has grown rapidly, outpaced its competitors and now serves more than 175 financial institutions.
5) How has Resurgent India been a contributor to the growth and development of the BFSI sector?
Resurgent acts as an extended arm of the banks in India, helping corporate to raise funds. We are driven by our quest to build a transparent funding infrastructure in India. We syndicate loans only for borrowers we would have lent money too if we had the resources.
Over the years, we have worked closely with banks, industry bodies, top-rated universities and government bodies to train, support and raise awareness about financial management. Our research papers on banking and other financial services have been well received in the BFSI industry and have helped with strategy and policy formulation.
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