Mumbai : Kreditech, the leading group for digital consumer lending using machine-learning based underwriting, is now licensed by the Reserve Bank of India to operate as Non-Banking Financial Company. It is the first time this license has been granted to any operation in the history of the finance industry in India.

Kreditech aims to revolutionize the consumer credit market by assessing the creditworthiness of individuals solely based on alternative data. With the newly acquired license, the company is now ready to offer a broad range of online consumer credit products to Indian customers. Kreditech’s product suite for India will offer highly individualized direct-to-consumer loans as well as its Lending-as-a-service solution for vendors (LAAS), which allows partners to offer customized credit products to their customers.

“With this license, we enter a new era of lending in India,” says Ashish Kohli MD & CEO, India operations. “The certification has taken into account our robust systems, technology and customer grievance redressal mechanism and helps us stand out from our competitors. We would also like to sincerely thank the regulators for providing detailed policy for online lenders like us, proving customers in India with a secure framework for online lending and ensuring only serious and reliable players will prevail in the market.”

“The consumer lending industry in India is witnessing major disruption through technological innovation such as real-time scoring models on the basis of big data and machine learning algorithms,“ he further adds. “Currently, many NBFCs are focusing on the digital space. We, however, approach the market differently as our business model is based on an entirely digital end-to-end solution, right from origination to digital disbursement to collection. We are completely focused for customer and ensure customers are given top priority and create a win-win proposition.”

Ashish Kohli has been inducted as MD & CEO in April 2018 and is responsible for managing Asia business for Kreditech. He has more than 20 years of experience in retail financing and will be the face for regulators.

“With a market potential of roughly US$ 1 trillion in revenue for the next five years, India clearly is the most promising emerging market for Kreditech,” states David Chan, CEO at Kreditech. “Our proprietary credit scoring technology can assess an applicant’s creditworthiness in seconds and with higher precision than traditional credit-bureau based systems can. That way, we are able to offer credit to people quicker and in a most efficient way. The Indian market may be a tough one, but our best-of-breed AI technology, robust infrastructure and the newly acquired the NBFC license give us a head starts to claim our position in the market and help us bridge the gap in the growing consumer lending white space in India.”