New earners in India are either underserved or unserved by traditional banking systems: Anil Pinapala, CEO & Founder Vivifi India Finance

Anil Pinapala, Chief Executive Officer, and Founder, Vivifi India Finance

The regulatory intervention is ensuring operational compliance and enabling the Fintech ecosystem to support sustainable growth of the sector, as a whole, shares, Anil Pinapala, Chief Executive Officer, and Founder, Vivifi India Finance with Rashi Aditi Ghosh of Elets News Network (ENN).

How are you customising UX and UI to serve the needs of the organisation’s target audience?

We strive to deliver a seamless and frictionless user experience. We have an experienced team of UI-UX professionals who monitor customer journeys and update our app and web platforms to simplify the user journey. To bring in additional convenience, we would be launching vernacular versions of our app to be able to reach out to potential users in the remotest corners of India.

Your organisation’s vision is to offer innovative financial products to customers across the credit spectrum. How are you leveraging technology and data science to focus on underserved/unserved customers?

The initiative of “Har Ghar Mein FlexPay” is focused on removing the need for the under-served and unserved customer from reaching out to family, friends, employer or unregistered lenders for their emergency loan needs. With this initiative, we serve the underserved and unserved credit segments of India, who don’t have access to formal credit. We aim to empower them and ensure financial inclusion by making formal credit available to every household within India, transcending barriers of the 5L’s: language, literacy, location, livelihood and lending history. Offering credit products that offer flexibility in withdrawals and payments to the under- served/unserved is a multi-billion-dollar opportunity that provides a foundation for improved credit behaviour.

FlexPay is India’s first and only personal emergency line of credit that offers a ready credit app which is an EMI-free option and is tailored to meet their needs and gives them the flexibility in repayment. Not going away from the discipline of repayment, it gives them the decision of how much can be repaid in a particular month owing to their financial needs each month. We were the first in the industry to incorporate a video KYC process and are working to extend this to customer registration & on-boarding processes. We will also be India’s only form-free onboarding that will be based on video, voice, and images. FlexPay is bridging the gap by offering sachet-sized credit in a credit card like structure over the ubiquitous UPI network.

Having served customers in over 16,000 pin codes across India, FlexPay has been able to offer credit to individuals without any other credit option either owing to their employment, income, credit score, social profile, location, or literacy amongst many others. FlexPay has been able to serve over 2,80,000 salaried/self-employed individuals who are accessing credit for short-term or medium-term needs. It enables a digital credit card like experience for customers without credit cards and incomes as low as `4,000 per month.

How do you see the credit market for millennials in India?

The credit-conscious and financially literate Millennials understand credit management better and are driving a shift in the way India consumes credit. However, new earners in India are either underserved or unserved by traditional banking systems, as they have very less or no credit history. These thin file consumers also have no access to credit cards, and this is exactly where products like FlexPay stepped in to provide credit to all unbanked consumers.

Flexpay’s personal line of credit especially benefits the new to credit or the young earners as it ensures you have access to credit as and when you require, helping you smoothly sail through month-end blues or manage your purchases, without having to worry about immediate payment. Apart from the ease of access and usage, FlexPay has also been used by its consumers to build and improve their credit scores, making it a one stop App for your credit needs.

What are your views on the regulatory intervention in your industry? Do you have any suggestions to make to the regulator to smoothen out protocols for businesses?

The regulatory intervention is ensuring operational compliance and enabling the Fintech ecosystem to support sustainable growth of the sector, as a whole. With the new RBI Guidelines in place, the digital lending industry will scale to its full potential.

How do you foresee year 2023 for the business, and the industry?

The digital lending industry will scale to its full potential, making consumption led credit the driver of growth for India’s march to be a 5 trillion dollar economy. Owing to the huge hole in the middle of the credit pyramid where nearly 300+ million Indians are totally credit-deprived, Fintechs and licensed NBFCs facilitating the financial inclusion initiative seem to have a huge market to cater to and will gain prominence in the years to come. The digital lending industry is well- positioned to scale and grow by adapting as quickly as possible and, at the same time, providing better access to financial products to the customers, which will facilitate financial inclusion in the country.

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