This abstract unveils the enthralling startup journey of CreditMantri Finserv Private Limited, one of the pioneers to embrace technology and innovation to set up a platform that caters to a diverse range of financial services. Bringing in over sixty years of combined business acumen in the area of banking services, Gowri Mukherjee, Rajasundaram Sudarshan, and Ranjit Punja are the Co-founders of the company. Over the years, CreditMantri has evolved as a preferred choice for over 10.5 million customers who go along with the vision and mission of the company. To get more insights about the company’s prominent services and uniqueness, we bring you an exclusive interview with Gowri, Rajasundaram, and Ranjit.
- Kindly brief us about the company.
CreditMantri uses data and technology to simplify credit decision making for both borrowers and lenders and facilitates financial growth for ALL – whether credit healthy, new to credit or credit challenged. Our mantra – “Credit Healthy toh Credit Wealthy” defines everything we do. We are a digital first company. Everyone, not just technology and data science teams think of how to make it easier, quicker for the user. Technology and Innovation has always been our strong suit – be it pioneering credit profiles using alternate data or co-creating credit products. CreditMantri leverages data and technology to transform the way credit is delivered in India.
- Please tell us something about the Founder/CEO and his/her contribution towards the company.
We are three co-founders – Gowri Mukherjee, R. Sudarshan and Ranjit Punja, with the common thread being that we all worked at Citibank for many years. The founders have diverse experience in digital banking/marketing, product & operations management, credit and collections management, technology and data science. Together the co-founders have over 60 years of banking experience, both in India and overseas.
- Your perspective about the Startup world.
Startups are extremely exciting, high energy, adrenaline-rush providing, high stress and very satisfying places to be. Besides being fully committed and passionate, one has to be wired a certain way to enjoy and thrive in the startup world. Some lessons learned so far on managing a high growth startup:
- Vision is critical, but results matter more
- Throw caution to the wind and GO FOR IT
- Inspiration should move team members to serve customers better than the competition
- Listening is often more important than talking
- You cannot do it all yourself – surround yourself with innovative & collaborative high performers
- Ditch the strategies that you love but that don’t work
- Leadership gets more complex as the startup grows
- Mention any awards and appreciations that your company has received.
Listed below are a few of the awards that we received in 2018:
- 100 Leading Fintech Companies Globally – presented by IFC and Stanford
- Global Fintech 250 – presented by CB Insights
- The Economic Times BFSI Innovation Tribe Award
- The CII Connect Award for Exemplary Application of IT
- The TIECon Award for Growth Story of The Year – 2018
- Please describe the journey of your organization so far.
CreditMantri received its Series A funding in May 2015 from IDG, Elevar and Accion. In March 2017 we raised our Series B from Quona and NewID, besides participation from existing investors. We now have over 10.5 million customers, deal with over 55 financial institution partners and deliver this with team strength of 165. The entire team (except 2 team members) is based in our office in Chennai.
- Kindly describe in detail about your distinct services and products.
At CreditMantri, we offer a customer-centric digital credit platform where users are credit profiled and empowered to make better borrowing decisions. This platform also serves as an engine that helps lenders discover borrowers who meet their credit requirements. Based upon the completion of the credit profile our customers fall into the below listed categories where we offer them the services listed below:
- If you are credit challenged – CreditMantri provides credit improvement services designed to resurrect your credit score and help you become credit healthy and regain access to new loans & credit cards
- If you are credit healthy – CreditMantri helps select credit products that are best aligned to your incremental credit needs, and also helps you to save money on your existing credit obligations
- If you are new to credit – CreditMantri helps obtain new credit by co-creating tailor-made products with lenders that utilize alternate data (in the absence of Bureau data) to help underwrite and verify applications received from customers in this segment
CreditMantri also offers lenders with a credit decisioning tool (the Credit Gateway) that enables lenders to make instant and more efficient & cost-effective decisions about potential loan applicants using traditional and alternate data points that are gathered digitally.
- What has been your game of plan to tackle the challenges in terms of changing trends, market players and innovations happening in the Startup industry?
While tacking challenges is par for the course in running any business, provided below is our game plan in managing some of these:
- Ensuring that there is a constant source of funding
- Constantly innovating and striving to stay ahead
- Making sure that the plan is being executed by a high caliber team
- Building a brand that inspires confidence
- Constantly managing to tight budgets and operating at high efficiency
- Building strong relationships and partnerships
- Enlighten us about any new advancements and technologies that have had a huge impact on the Startup industry.
Specifically, in the Fintech world, the Digital India initiative combined with the India Stack enablers will enable Indians leapfrog even more developed economies. While there appear to be some more recent roadblocks, these are likely to be cleared in short order making way for significant progress. Some of these enablers are listed below:
- Aadhaar – ability to verify anyone with an Aadhaar, anytime and anywhere
- Jan Dhan Yojana accounts – providing widespread affordable access to financial services
- Increasing popularity/usage of smart phones
- eKYC – ability to digitize the KYC process and go paperless
- UPI – enables bank account holders to send/receive money instantly using smartphones
- eSign – Signing any document electronically using Aadhaar
- Describe the unique solutions/products that make your company stand out amongst the rest.
CreditMantri is the only player offering services to every segment of the population – credit healthy, credit challenged and new to credit. We are the largest player helping the credit under-served segments, either by rebuilding their credit scores or by making available credit using alternate data to the hitherto new to credit segment.
- What is your advice to the young entrepreneurs in the Startup Industry?
- Dream big and throw yourself fully into what you love doing
- Important to surround yourself with capable people who challenge you, who support you, and build long lasting relationships with them
- Be a lifelong student – constantly learn and keep yourself updated
- Have an obligation to guide others and help them rise
- Stay healthy
- How do you portray the future of your company? Tell us something about your upcoming solutions.
Improving our offerings and products continuously is what makes our proposition compelling to users. We soon intend to have an offering for SME’s similar to our current offering for individuals. We will broaden our offering to traverse the entire gamut of financial services needs of an individual. We want to be synonymous with credit health.
