'RupeePower Has Helped Banks And NBFCs In Digitising Their Customer Acquisition'

Tejasvi Mohanram, Founder & CEO, Rupeepower speaks to BW Businessworld on his success mantra, his business model, and the future of FInTech in India.

Tejasvi, congratulations on building out a successful business in a relatively short time! What's your success mantra?
Thank you very much! There is still a long way to go. Through my personal experience of applying for a loan, I found the entire process very rigid, cumbersome and digitally backward in a country where the growth of digitisation and internet penetration is enormous. When I decided to build my business, I realised that the approach of completely changing a system is not the right way to go. I instead recognised pain points in the system and set out to solve it. In doing so, RupeePower was born as a solution to improve the existing system, partnering with banks and lenders to help them renovate, if not re-furbish, their digital lending operations.

Tell us a bit about your business model. How does RupeePower make money and is your business operationally profitable?
Though various revenue models exist for different kinds of loans that we help disburse to the customers, our main model of earning is through receiving a small percentage of loans we help disburse. We have been operationally profitable since FY 16-17.

Where exactly does RupeePower fit into the retail lending ecosystem? What value does it create for lenders and borrowers?
RupeePower has helped India's largest banks and NBFCs in digitising their customer acquisition and credit decisioning process. As a lending institution, one can benefit from RupeePower's omni-channel customer acquisition, decisioning and underwriting platforms, enabling instant & paperless disbursal of loans and credit products.

As a customer, you can instantly compare personalised loan/card offers on the company's marketplace RupeePower.com from over 15 lenders (Banks, NBFCs and HFCs), apply online and get an instant in-principle approval. RupeePower's vision is to become a one-stop personal finance platform for Indian consumers, bringing personal financial planning, credit, insurance and investment products under one roof.

Where do you foresee future opportunities in the FinTech space in India? Do you plan to leverage upon your client base to enter other domains of financial services - such as Investment Advisory, for instance?
The future of Fintech space India is definitely moving towards complete digitization of credit processes. With the Fintech space being on a growth spurt, we see credit being extended to a larger percentage of our people, and RupeePower is actively in the process of making that a reality. We also see more and more Financial processes becoming paperless, and alternate decisioning becoming the new norm of assessing credit worthiness. We will be looking into expanding into other domains in the future, however, our focus is on the credit and loan space right now.

Who are RupeePower's Top 3 biggest competitors and how do you strive to outdo them? What's your USP?
As RupeePower is the only firm in the market that provides an End-to-End seamless digital credit decisioning platform, it is hard to decide if there are any competitors in our space. There are various companies providing services that are a part of the entire flow of credit disbursal, right from the marketplace to final approval, however, RupeePower is the only platform that provides it all.

In a rather unusual (and gutsy!) move, you recently bought back SnapDeal's share in your company. What led to this decision?
We partnered with SnapDeal, as data is a big requirement for us to provide FinTech Services in a segment as complex as credit decisioning. Consumer behaviour has always been the basis of understanding the pain points in the system and developing our solutions. We have also been developing and researching alternate decisioning models. Walking further down this path, we needed more data for effective solutions and realized that being a SnapDeal partner would close other avenues of data and research. Therefore, we reached the decision of becoming independent and expanding our partnerships to serve our customers better.

The viability of some FinTech business models around the world have come under the scanner off late. How dependent are you at this stage on outside capital, and what are the key external risks to your business right now?
We have been a profitable venture since FY 16-17. However, we are considering looking at funding to expand the business further, both in terms of making our solutions more robust and expanding our customer base.

Lastly - I know this a clichéd last question, but what's your five-year vision for RupeePower?
Democratise access to credit for all Indians by maximising their decisioning footprint and minimising opex for lenders.