Paisabazaar.com Launches ‘Paisabazaar Stack’

GURGAON:
Paisabazaar.com, India’s largest digital marketplace for lending products, announced today the launch ‘Paisabazaar Stack’ – a Stack of capabilities that would make loan disbursals and credit card issuance completely digital. The Stack, through integrations with bank and NBFC partners, would enable consumers on the Paisabazaar platform to access credit products through presence-less and contactless processes.

Under the Digitization Stack, Paisabazaar.com has built completely digital solutions for KYC verification, income and employment validation, repayment set-up and consent on loan agreement. Paisabazaar.com is currently partnering with IndusInd Bank to offer customers on its platform a completely digital process for credit cards, using Paisabazaar Stack.

Soumitra Sen, Country Head, Consumer Banking, IndusInd Bank, said, “At IndusInd Bank, our focus has always been on offering fast and seamless financial solutions to our customers. In keeping with this vision, we are happy to partner with Paisabazaar to bring forth a comprehensive digital infrastructure platform which enables customers to undertake a host of activities such as KYC verification, income and employment validation, consent on loan agreement among others, in a fully digital manner, without having to visit a bank branch. The journey is jointly managed by the Bank along with Paisabazaar and is powered by ‘Paisabazaar Stack’; making it frictionless and seamless.”

Naveen Kukreja, CEO & Co-founder, Paisabazaar.com, said, “As the market leader with partnerships with most large banks and new-age lenders, we believe Paisabazaar.com is uniquely placed to accelerate this critical shift towards the much-needed digitization of the entire ecosystem. I believe our Digitization Stack is a big step in that direction.”

According to Paisabazaar.com, with its Stack, a large section of customers would be able to access credit much quicker, from the comfort of their homes, with zero physical interaction as each erstwhile physical step in the lending process has now been built digitally. From an earlier 3 to 7-day disbursal time, Paisabazaar today, through its Digital Stack integrations with partners, can help provide unsecured loans within 3-5 hours.

KYC Verification
Paisabazaar.com has built a Digital KYC Module in its Digital Stack which includes Offline KYC verification or O-KYC (automated XML Parsing) and the subsequent Video KYC enablement, which comprises video chat, liveliness check and face match with a bank official and location tagging.

Customers would also be able to seamlessly upload their digital copies of their KYC documents like Aadhaar, PAN, Voter’s id etc. with security and authenticity checks put in place through real-time OCR verification, selfie photo match and documentation check with the source, like NSDL for PAN.

Income & Employment Validation
Accelerating the lending process significantly, Paisabazaar.com can now validate income and employment details of consumers applying for a loan on its platform seamlessly. Through the Stack, the fintech can evaluate and do a thorough analysis of an applicant’s bank statements to determine his financial health and provide the results to its lending partners, which helps in quicker decisioning.

Also, instead of sending self-attested bank statements and salary slips physically, customers would now be able to provide their proof of income to Paisabazaar digitally. Paisabazaar would then check and verify the employment details provided by the customer in a digitized manner, through official email verification, Mobile and UAN validation, EPFO data validation and Employer plus Domain Check.

Repayment Set-up & Agreements
With the deployment of the Digitization Stack, it would require minimum effort from the lenders and fast-track the NACH process, as Paisabazaar.com would be able to verify the bank account details and set up repayment instructions through digital mandate on behalf of its partner lenders. A pre-filled digital agreement would be used to take customer consent through Clickwrap or OTP and live location data capture.

As lending, traditionally, has been predominantly dependent on offline and paper-heavy processes which needed physical interaction between the borrower and the lender, the industry was severely affected by the pandemic and lockdown, especially for the first two months, after the heath crisis broke out.

Gaurav Aggarwal, Director & Head of Unsecured Loans, Paisabazaar.com, said, “Till now, processes were not only cumbersome and time-consuming, but also susceptible to restrictions on physical movement or interactions. We have focussed now to build infrastructure to make the journey completely digital and convenient for current times.”

Paisabazaar.com works with over 130 partners to offer all types of lending products on its platform to cater to the credit enquiries from over 1200 cities and towns every month. The fintech is currently working with several Banks and NBFCs to integrate its Stack and offer a wider choice of completely digital credit products on the Paisabazaar platform.

Mukesh Sharma, CTO, Paisabazaar.com, said, “As a marketplace, the basic premise of making the Digitization Stack was to make it easily configurable for our partners and have the ability to take it live and scale it very quickly with them. Not only is completely safe and secure but is also built for seamless integration with our partners.”

Paisabazaar.com is India’s only independent digital player to reach an annualized loan disbursal of Rs. 12,000 crore or USD 1.5 billion. The fintech in pre-COVID times was ~2% of the unsecured lending market and believes digitization would accelerate its progress in reaching its goal of 10% of the unsecured loans market.