The financial services industry, as we know it, is undergoing a fundamental transformation. As UPI revolutionised payments, there lies massive potential in innovating across other elements of the finance stack such as lending, compliance, insurance, etc that will reimagine the future of financial services, for the country and for the world. One such team is Sangeet Verma and Siddharth Bhardwaj, who, with Finverv, aim to build the most robust credit infrastructure for technology platforms and seamlessly enable credit demand for lenders. We at Antler are thrilled to back Finverv on day zero of its journey of building the critical infrastructure needed for enabling thousands of organizations to offer credit to their customers and suppliers while helping lenders build profitable and scalable partnerships.
It’s the era of embedded finance
Allowing non-financial players to offer financial services, embedded finance presents a concrete source of monetization for B2C and B2B platforms alike. As every company tries to better serve and retain their existing customers, offering services such as lending will allow them to add another revenue source while also improving customer engagement and retention. This rebundling of financial services will enable the companies not equipped to build the complex and costly infrastructure to still enjoy the benefits of offering financial services to their existing customer base and use them to attract new customers. Though still significantly under-penetrated, India is already a massive (>$1 trillion by 2023) market for lending to SMEs and consumers. As India’s market for digital lending grows to $350 billion by 2023, companies will proactively embed lending into their ecosystem to participate in the upside.
Too many stakeholders, too complex a lending infrastructure
Lending is one of the most complicated integrations for any organization. The current process requires platforms to work with multiple stakeholders (e.g. multiple NBFCs, KYC platforms, etc) and build complex systems (e.g. underwriting, LMS, LOS, etc) leading to months of effort before a launch. Companies shy away from building a comprehensive lending infrastructure due to difficulty in identifying, onboarding, and managing multiple risk-matched partners to avoid concentration risk and the excessive amount of tech and business bandwidth required to build this.
On the other hand, this process is equally painstaking for lenders. Intense sales and business development effort is required to find and onboard the right partners followed by complexities in building tailored LOS (Loan Origination System), LMS (Loan Management System), underwriting engine, etc. Given most lenders are traditional businesses and less tech-savvy, there is high friction for lenders to do this themselves hence leaving a very large opportunity on the table.
Finverv, #1 plug-and-play embedded lending infrastructure
Finverv’s plug-and-play solution enables an organization to set the process up in less than a week. The full stack platform helps organizations integrate with multiple lenders (NBFCs, Banks), and provides a suite of lending tools like KYC, onboarding, risk management, LMS, LOS, and white-labeled customer journeys via simple plug-and-play integrations. Providing the technological infrastructure to facilitate this lender-borrower equation, Finverv allows organizations to onboard their own lending partners while offering portfolio management for lenders to manage collaborations.
For organizations, the appeal is the ease and low cost way of providing lending-as-a-service. For lenders (NBFCs and Banks), by providing portfolio management tool to manage collaborations, it is a means to leverage the spectrum of opportunities across sectors and access data driven risk management.
A full stack approach for organizations and lenders
As embedded lending becomes a major need for most companies as a way to monetize their existing customer base, we believe, a full stack SaaS solution like Finverv will be the way going forward. With Finverv, companies can integrate multiple lenders at the same time, avoiding concentration risk while making it easier for lenders to manage their partnerships. Dramatically reducing cost and complexity, Finverv’s full stack solution will enable the organizations to:
- Onboard and manage multiple lenders without the need to spend months of sales/business development and tech integration effort
- Mitigate concentration risk considering the ability to actively work with multiple lenders
- Increase customer conversions and average order values due to the lending offering
- Better monetize the platform through high margin lending products
- Embed Finverv’s white labeled customer journeys to offer a superior customer experience
The core of our thesis is Finverv’s founding team that is uniquely positioned to build this robust platform with strong product, domain expertise, and differentiated insights. Having founded a fintech product solving payments, credits, and invoicing for SMEs, Siddharth has deep domain expertise in BFSI and has first-hand experience in dealing with this problem. Sangeet complements the team with a strong tech and product background having worked with multiple large consumer tech platforms such as Spinny, CarDekho, and ServX. Together, Siddharth and Sangeet are poised to solve the issue of low penetration of financing in the country by building a strong supply of credit.
Read more about Finverv’s pre-seed round funding as appeared in Entrepreneur India.
If you are a company looking to offer lending solutions to your customers and/or suppliers, check out Finverv.
