The vehicle repossession business mostly deals with highly sensitive information. This information is shared among banks, repossession agencies, and repo agents using the Easy Recovery system. To know more about the vehicle repossession businesses, Deepak Soni, CEO & Founder, Easy Recovery, had an interaction with Srajan Agarwal of Elets News Network (ENN).
You are developing end-to-end solutions for the vehicle recovery process for banks and recovery agencies. How are you expanding your offerings in this?
Easy Recovery is a platform that is common to all banks, NBFCs, and their authorised repossession agencies which creates transparency between the banks, authorised recovery agencies, and the repo agents who work for the recovery agencies.
We help in the repossession process of banks and authorised recovery agencies and provide complete traceability to the banks and NBFCs about the recovery agencies’ activities.
Unauthorised repo charges: Our system provides real-time tracking of the repo agent’s activities and provides you with a detailed dashboard to track all the user activity, which in turn helps agency owners avoid unauthorised repo payment transactions.
Data security: Protecting digital information from unauthorised access, corruption, or theft throughout its entire life cycle by sharing vehicle details to authorised repo agencies will happen through Easy Recovery Software. This is done so that authorised agencies are unable to extract this data from the platform. This will further stop data-sharing between unauthorised agencies.
Data analysis: The goal of discovering useful information is by providing consolidated reports to the agency owner like Vehicle Search Report of Repo Agents, Accounting Details snapshot on the dashboard etc.
How are you working with recovery agencies to track the activities as NBFCs have zero visibility on their activities?
Easy Recovery software has an option for bank admin in which they can include and diminish recovery agencies at any point in time and all this data that is uploaded on their software can be accessed only by the enrolled agencies’ users.
All enrolled agencies are incapable of updating, deleting, editing, and exporting the data provided by the bank.
Bankers have the visibility of the vehicle searched by every user of the recovery agencies, and they also have a record of vehicles that are recovered. For eg. Tracking all the activities of your registered agents like:
- How many vehicles have been searched by recovery agencies in a month?
- How many vehicles have been recovered?
- How much is the collection based on the team size of the recovery agencies?
- Which particular vehicle has been searched by which repo agent and at what date and time?
- All this data will be stored on the cloud. Hence, they can be accessed anytime, anywhere, and after many years.
Earlier, getting the above data was impossible. This illuminates the fraud and scam that is happening in the current ecosystem of the repossession business.
What are the major challenges faced by you in the vehicle repossession business?
The most important and challenging one is to convince the banks and NBFCs about the concept of getting into a common platform where they will work transparently with recovery agencies and can track their user activities and location. They are used to the legacy system, and it takes effort to break this.
Another point of discussion that happens is that bankers claim they can have their own system through which the data can be distributed and activities can be tracked instead of having a common system that is being shared with other NBFCs and Banks. But, creating individual software by the NBFCs will ultimately lead to a complex conflict for recovery agencies in case of the application usability as recovery agencies work on data shared by different banks and NBFCs, and if each of the individual NBFCs starts to create their own vehicle repossession application, every recovery agency will have to get the application of all the enrolled banks and NBFCs they work with. This will only increase the complexity for recovery agencies to repo vehicles instead of making the ecosystem of the repossession business convenient and efficient.
Another challenge is that recovery agencies repel this model since this will make their activities transparent to the bankers, and bankers might hold them accountable for any trouble. Surprisingly, the business owners were not aware that having technology integrated into their system can make their job easy and way more effective.
Technologies such as cloud computing, SaaS, etc are rapidly developing as commercial drivers. How are these deployments evaluating the risk of data leakage in your organisation?
Enhancement in technologies such as cloud computing, SaaS, and many others will come up with an improvement in security as well. As for the current scenario, we have an AWS server that comes with a well-developed security system for data privacy. AWS Cloud providers deploy a range of advanced security tools to protect customer applications and data. With the presence of multiple encryption layers, data remains protected in the database from any leak or theft. Their different instances provide enhancement in security and sharing services.
All the associated user agencies enrolled with easy recovery have their own separate database. All the uploaded data will be present in an encrypted form only in their database. This ensures that there will be no data leakage or data sharing without the permission of the account holder.
What role will blockchain play in the vehicle repossession business in the future? Are you also experimenting with it?
The vehicle repossession business mostly deals with highly sensitive information. This information is shared among banks, repossession agencies, and repo agents using the Easy Recovery system.
When information travels from one entity to another, there are always concerns regarding the authenticity and integrity of information. There are chances that one party gets corrupted and could damage the entire network. The form of corruption could be anything – it could be technical, hacking, manipulating information, etc. So far, Easy Recovery has maintained a very high standard of system and we are proud to say that our system was never compromised because of following the high standard of security principles. We use OWASP principles to secure our system. When we build a system with the usual database and everything happens on a single system, it creates concerns if the information-providing blockchain party is authentic or not.
Blockchain is a tool that keeps information on a distributed ledger. Information on a distributed ledger cannot be modified. This gives us the ability to maintain the authenticity and integrity of data.
Blockchain can play a vital role in the vehicle repossession business. For example, when a repo agent searches for a vehicle, the information about the search can be stored in blocks of the blockchain. Once this information is stored, it cannot be altered. Which means an agency and bank can verify whether a vehicle was searched or not. There is no way for any entity to edit this information from the blockchain. This creates set up trust among all the entities involved in the vehicle repossession business.
Our experimentation
As of now, we are experimenting with HyperLedger-Fabric private blockchain to set up the entire system on a distributed ledger. HyperLedger-Fabric is a private blockchain that could be customised for vehicle repossession business. We are currently setting up multiple nodes to test distributed ledgers. In this system, any bank or agency can own a node that will participate in the consensus of blocks.
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