A Chennai-based financial technology start-up, CreditMantri was created by three ex-bankers—Ranjit Punja, R Sudarshan and Gowri Mukherjee with the intent to change the way credit is delivered in our country.

The approach enables lenders and borrowers to better understand each other by leveraging the power of data, resulting in efficient credit decision making.  Punja, CEO and co-founder talks about the various features offered and their upcoming growth strategies. Excerpts from an interview:

Q What are the various features offered by CreditMantri?

This makes credit possible by helping customers take charge of their credit health and help them make better borrowing decisions. We offer a digital platform to be made more efficiently through the innovative use of data and technology.

Our services cater to the entire spectrum of credit seekers that include those who have never borrowed before, those with a sketchy credit history and those who have remained credit healthy. On our platform, customers can create their profile to understand their credit potential, a credit profile which includes your credit score is created using a combination of traditional data such as credit reports, bank statements and government data sources and alternate data such as social media, mobile phone data, etc.

Once this is created, users can discover loans and credit cards best suited to their profile, and these are made available from lenders across the risk continuum. We also help to resolve negative reporting issues on existing loans and assist with reducing current borrowing costs. We provide financial institutions access to better quality consumer risk profiles besides helping these institutions cut down on expensive credit operations and processes.

Simply put, our platform simplifies and redefines the way borrowers and lenders interact during the credit availing process.

Q Would you like to share any example that generated a huge positive impact for your clients?

In the past 30 months, we helped over 3 million Indians make better borrowing decisions by using their credit profile. This has been achieved through innovative use of data and an entirely seamless digital platform which can be accessed from any part of the country. The alternate data that we use to create the credit profile, assumes greater significance especially in India where it is estimated that 300 million have never borrowed before and a significant number on the credit bureau have a damaged credit history.

At present over 60 per cent of our customers provide access to 2,000+ data points to create their credit profile and thus becoming worthy of credit.  Over 45 lenders, including leading public, private, foreign banks and NBFCs use our platform to source consumers, resolve past loans and expand into new customer segments.

Q What are the challenges that the company faces in terms of technological development?

With the big digital push, we are heading towards an increasingly data dependent economy. In such an ecosystem, we are presented with challenges of data privacy and regulation.

Q Who are your strongest competitors?

We compete with different players across the credit and alternate lending space in the country. In that sphere we compete with BankBazaar and PaisaBazaar. In the credit improvement space, we compete with Credit Sudhaar and in the B2B space with Credit Vidya.

Q What would you say is CreditMantri’s primary advantage over competitors?

As an enabler of credit, the services we offer span across three segments of credit seekers — those who are new to credit, those with a sketchy credit history and those who are credit healthy. The breadth of the services that we offer differentiates us from our competitors.

On the B2B side, we are unique in the way we utilise digitally verifiable data points in helping lenders make faster, better informed and more reasonable credit decisions. This approach is particularly useful in a market like India where consumer understanding of credit scores and how it impacts their ability to borrow is very low.

Q What are your upcoming growth strategies?

We aim to be India’s most inclusive credit facilitator and to achieve this vision we are constantly working with various lenders to create tailor made products which would help bring formal credit to a large section of under banked Indians.

We are also committed to building a credit healthy nation by educating customers on the importance of good credit health. Credit Healthy toh Credit Wealthy.