Red Envelope: Lending is Easy, Responsible Lending is Hard

With Great Power come Great Responsibility. Especially when a
business is dealing with a market with 1.3 billion people. The
country has made massive strives towards financial inclusion:
According to the Global Findex Database, over 80 percent of the
adult population now has bank accounts. A series of efforts has
helped drive such progress, including Aadhaar, a verifiable
12-digit identification number issued by UIDAI to all residents
of India. The Aadhaar identity platform is one of the key pillars
of the ‘Digital India,’ and the Aadhaar program is now the
largest biometrics based identification system in the world.


In this episode of Rhetoriq's "Red Envelope", a series focused on
innovation in Asia, Theodora Lau and Arun Krishnakumar talk to
Lizzie Chapman, the CEO of Zestmoney. It is a B2B2C fintech
company that extends consumer credit through merchants using a
proprietary AI-based machine learning decision engine, leveraging
data points from the consumers’ digital footprint. The solution
provides dynamic credit limit based on affordability, and it is
tailored for households instead of individuals - taking into
account the social dynamics and needs of the Indian market. It is
this kind of solution which makes Indian fintech stand out.


Along with a progressive government, consumers in India are tech
savvy and fast adopters of digital technologies. Mobile
penetration is expected to reach 90% by 2020, which will help
drive further adoption of fintech tools, increasing the potential
to uplift local communities via entrepreneurship and new job
opportunities.


There is an untapped market for consumers who don’t have a credit
card or other formal financing options. This includes the need
for affordable solutions to help consumers “buy now, pay later”
and help build long term credit. Zestmoney also educates
consumers about their credit score through its platform - so that
they can better maintain a long-term financial relationship
rather than being penalized for being consistently transactional
alone.


Hear from Lizzie on how good the ecosystem in India is for
Fintech startups.


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