How Startup Capital Float Is Using Machine Learning To Automate Loan Processing

CAPITAL FLOAT, an online platform that provides working capital finance to SMEs, has leveraged technology to build a differentiated model that is able to deliver credit to the smallest of businesses in a scalable and efficient manner. Rohan Angrish, CTO, Capital Float, tells EC, how his firm is leveraging innovative techniques such as cellphone penetration to offer customized financial services, APIs to achieve higher levels of scale and efficiency, and machine learning to take internal efficiencies to a new level.

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How do you use technology to differentiate your firm?

Today, the data and technology today has reached a point where we can actually bring down both in cost to the originator as well as pricing for purchase-taking loans. We see ourselves as setting up a new trajectory or setting a new paradigm within which to operate where other players will come in and participate. We call this coopetition. We are looking at being not being a lender but being a lending platform. We create this differentiator by capturing as many data points that are possible about the customer.

Lets take the example of SMEs to explain this concept. If you break down the segment of SMEs across two different axis, there are online SMEs and offline SMEs. Within this online segment, there are SMEs about which you have a reliable digital footprint of some shape and size. There is some reliable digital data and then there are SMEs out of which there is a more reliable digital footprint. Now the e-commerce guys fall squarely in their online businesses and there’s a reliable digital footprint that we can use to underwrite that particular business which is why it’s a sort of a low hanging fruit where Capital Float entered. And we penetrated that market to the extent that we became the leading player in the market. We set the trend and we set the business model .

Then you have the other quadrant which is offline businesses about whom we have no digital footprint. That’s hard to crack, that is the kirana who is sitting in a Tier 3, Tier 4 town or maybe in a village. So the Holy Grail is to effectively get to those people but there is this sort of transitionary middle quadrant which is really interesting, This can be an offline shop or an offline SME but has a digital footprint and this is where Capital Float deals.