It's technology all the way

Some NBFCs have gone a step ahead and even automated the middleware, which has made the loan underwriting process also extremely quick, more efficient and transparent. Rather than having key executives pouring over pages of documentation for assessing creditworthiness and risk involved in lending to a customer, technology have enabled these managers to be able to focus on attending to more pressing business needs.

Yet, the approach to technology has been non-uniform for most of the players when it comes to ensuring the complete digitisation of the entire lending stack.

Tech all the way

The future of NBFCs lies in having originate-to distribute (OTD) business models with a fully integrated back-end, middleware and front-end services for making the entire lending stack technology-driven. This doesn’t simply end at automating the loan disbursal process, but adopting solutions that would enable the companies to quickly react to business events, market and customer demands and have a robust technology platform that can quickly be adapted and scaled up to offer dynamic credit products.

Some of the NBFC are already on the job by taking a holistic approach to technology adoption to digitise the entire stack. The entire digital stack is powered by global technology giants that ensure not only automation of processes, but also instant credit decisioning, digital workflows, enhanced early warning and digital collections processes, and even product innovations, all at a minimal turnaround time. Both NBFCs and banks will rely on Big Data analytics, algorithms and AI for credit analysis and lending decisions to lend to underserved markets without much enhancing the risks. Social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp have been used by companies and lenders for garnering customer feedback but now technology has enabled lenders to shift through social media conversations for analysing risks before making their lending decisions.

Adopting technological innovations at all stages of the lending stack has been enabling NBFCs to optimise their workforce and workflows, enhance turnaround time, enable educated and smarter decision-making and ensure availability of credit for new customer segments at the best possible rates. Most important it’s also the demand from the consumers. Technology has become hygiene, and one has no choice but to adopt to stay relevant in the game.