Mumbai: On the occasion of International Women’s Day, GrayQuest, India’s largest education financing company released a report which states that women are leading the way in adopting the ‘Study Now, Pay Later’ model with 6X growth in registration by women customers in 2020 as compared to 2019. Moreover, the report revealed that in more than 20% families, women are paying for their children’s education now.
The study conducted among 1.5 lakh women customers across the country, found that while pandemic induced salary cuts and business downturn were some of the reasons for women opting for easy financing, the financial convenience of paying fees monthly and the willingness to try a new mode of fee payment, remained the top reasons. According to the data, 28% of the women borrowers belonged to non-metro cities i.e. tier 2-4 cities.
Established in 2017, GrayQuest has increased the convenience of educational fee payments in the country. The company has partnered with more than 2500+ leading schools, colleges and universities across the country and allows parents to pay their children’s education fees in easy monthly payments through their product offering of ‘Study Now, Pay Later’. The service allows students & parents from leading schools and universities to convert their annual fee into bite sized monthly payments. This has enabled new sets of customers such as women and students to take on the responsibility of paying for education.
GrayQuest Founder and CEO Rishab Mehta said, “Women are an intrinsic part of the workforce today and are breaking traditional gender roles by playing an active role in financially supporting the family. Given the rising aspiration of parents to provide the best education to their children, we are seeing more mothers taking up the financial responsibility of their child’s education needs. Moreover, the pandemic has further given impetus to the importance of financial planning for educational requirements. We, at GrayQuest, have seen a six-fold increase in women customers over the last one year from both metro and non-metro cities. It is encouraging to see more women take on the responsibility of paying for their child’s education and we are glad to be able to support them by providing convenient fee payment options.”
The survey also revealed that most women borrowers are millennial mothers, of which nearly 12% are single women who have single-handedly taken up the responsibility of financing their child’s education. The average ticket size of the fees being over INR 1 lakh.
Further, 80% women borrowers had opted for these services for their child’s school education needs, whereas the remaining 20% women used the service to finance their children’s higher education needs.