With its quirky charm and tight quarters, our team often spilled into the hallways for meetings and interviews, embodying the true essence of a startup. The space may have been snug, but it was a haven for big ideas and close-knit camaraderie.

In January 2020, our business was thriving, and so was our team—a little too much for the space we had. That’s when we decided to add a mezzanine floor. Imagine a loft but with height restrictions so tight that anyone taller than 5'5" had to bend to avoid a bump. Sure, it had no windows, but it symbolised our ability to innovate and adapt. The small, shared space brought us closer, fostering unity and collaboration. No one complained about the cramped quarters; instead, we embraced it as part of our story.

Then came the pandemic. Just as construction dust settled, the world shifted to remote work. The timing couldn’t have been more ironic. Months later, when we finally returned, business took off like a rocket. Thanks to our Digital Lending Growth (DLG) strategy, our stock price hit an all-time high, and Assets Under Management (AUM) soared by 175%. It was time for a new chapter.

Enter our new office, a 3000 sq ft gem just a few streets away from our old space. When Mikhil and Diksha discovered it, it was completely raw—a blank canvas full of possibilities. But turning it into our dream workspace was no small feat.

The vision? A raw, minimalistic masterpiece that would reflect our ethos: “Less is more.” This design philosophy reminds us that simplicity is powerful, and staying grounded fuels our ambition.

The neutral tones of the office, with its abundance of wood finishes and green plants, bring us closer to nature amidst a city of concrete towers. This intentional design fosters creativity, and the greenery not only adds a calming aesthetic but also reminds us to stay rooted in our values while reaching for the stars.

We wanted this office to embody growth while keeping the warmth of our old space. Big windows flood the rooms with sunlight, ensuring the space remains warm and inviting. The airy spaces and ample natural light make the office feel expansive and enhance well-being and productivity. 

Collaboration has always been the cornerstone of our success, so we ditched the traditional cabins and created an open-plan layout. Everyone works together in the main “den,” where communication and teamwork thrive effortlessly.

But it’s not all work and no play. We’ve added a communal lounge complete with a library, cosy seating, and a TV—a perfect spot to unwind with books, movies, or video games. This balance of work and relaxation mirrors our approach to business: purposeful yet enjoyable.

Our new office is more than just a change of scenery. It’s a celebration of our journey, a reflection of how far we’ve come, and a promise of what’s ahead. The unfinished walls are a deliberate touch, reminding us that we are always a work in progress—innovating, improving, and striving for excellence.

Here’s to many more years of success, collaboration, and innovation in our beautiful new home. As we scale new heights, this space will be the backdrop for our next big breakthroughs and milestones.

Curated Sourcing and Robust Underwriting

Apollo’s strength lies in its curated sourcing across the best digital NBFCs and fintechs with robust underwriting. By cherry-picking the top 10-20% of portfolios from every partner, Apollo ensures a high-quality book. This meticulous selection is reflected in our impressive NPA numbers, with over 66% of our book comprising customers with 700+ credit scores. While these portfolios may not be substantial with every partner, sourcing from multiple partners allows Apollo to scale a superior-quality portfolio effectively.

Tech-Driven B2B2C Business Model

Apollo’s tech-driven B2B2C business model sets it apart, enabling unparalleled advantages:

• Superior Return on Equity (ROE): Profitable since inception, Apollo boasts ROEs over twice the industry average, showcasing our technological prowess. 

• No cost of acquiring borrowers: Our excellent ROEs are also attributed to the fact that Apollo incurs no cost of borrower acquisition, which can be particularly high for premium customers sourced through our lending partners.

• Scalability: Remarkably, we’ve scaled 100%+ in the past year without increasing our team size, maintaining around 30 employees. Even with our large anticipated growth, we project a modest team size of 35.

• Financial Protection: With 90+ DPD PAR numbers below 1.98% and expected to decrease further, coupled with a 5% FLDG from partners, Apollo ensures strong financial protection across portfolios.

• Strategic Insights: Collaborating with multiple partners provides a broad view of digital lending trends, allowing Apollo to strategically focus on promising loans and swiftly exit deteriorating sectors.

• Smart Borrower Spotting: Our extensive network enables us to identify borrowers using multiple digital lenders within hours, mitigating exposure to high-risk customers.

Commitment to Long-Term Partnerships

Apollo’s commitment to charging our lending partners on the line of capital model fosters high-conviction, long-term partnerships. With a minimum duration of one year and obligations for partners to pay Apollo throughout this period, only those confident in scaling and maintaining a long-term relationship with Apollo join the platform.

Extensive Experience and Data-Driven Underwriting

Over the past 8+ years, Apollo has collaborated with 60+ digital lending partners, serving over 600,000 borrowers across India. This extensive experience provides a rich data source for world-class underwriting. By backtesting credit engines on this vast dataset, Apollo minimizes unnecessary live loan experiments. Additionally, geographical insights into borrower behaviour ensure policies are tailored regionally, enhancing overall performance.

Governance and Vintage

Apollo benefits from the governance standards of a publicly listed company and the vintage of a 40-year-old NBFC. This unique combination provides stability, trust, and reliability, further solidifying Apollo’s position as a leader in the fintech sector.

In conclusion, Apollo’s curated sourcing, tech-driven model, strategic partnerships, extensive experience, and robust governance set it apart in the fintech ecosystem. For those seeking excellence and innovation in fintech, Apollo is the clear choice.

Once the RBI announced the digital lending guidelines, the landscape of the lending ecosystem underwent a significant shift. The cap on first loss guarantee at 5% forced us at Apollo to reevaluate our Loan Service Providers (LSPs) and eliminate those whose loans were not performing in line with the new regulations. This reevaluation period resulted in a dip in our Assets Under Management (AUM) and a corresponding revenue slump. We had to write off several bad loans, but fortunately, since these were from the pre-DLG era, they had no impact on our profit before tax. The impairments/write-offs shown in the Q4 numbers result from the lending done in the previous quarters. They do not accurately reflect the quality of our loan portfolio from Q3 onwards. Therefore, the PBT numbers of Q4 are an aberration and not truly reflective of our performance in the quarter.

Amidst these challenges, a silver lining emerged. The new guidelines brought clarity and certainty to the industry, eliminating grey areas and providing a clear framework within which we could operate. This newfound clarity allowed us to focus on scaling effectively.

Our next step was to evaluate potential partners from the perspectives of book quality and scalability. It became evident that while some LSPs met our criteria, the digital lending Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) stood out. These digital NBFCs offered high-scale and good-quality books, largely driven by their ability to attract lenders and their strong compliance practices. In contrast, some LSPs struggled with compliance and scaling high-quality books, which required significant effort from our end with minimal revenue returns. The venture capital (VC) community's preference for NBFCs, due to their strong regulatory footing and profitability, further validated our focus on these entities in the post-DLG world.

To expedite our collaboration with digital NBFCs and understand their processes and loan quality better, we initiated short-term (3-12 month) term loans with them. This ran parallel to our efforts to integrate with them for an LSP or co-lending partnership. To ensure that we attracted committed and motivated partners confident in scaling, we maintained our practice of signing capital commitment agreements. These agreements mandated that any capital committed by us in a partnership would be utilized for a minimum of one year. Additionally, due to the accounting nature of co-lending partnerships, Apollo's revenue saw a drop since the interest from our co-lending partner was directly diverted. This contrasts with the LSP model where revenue flows through Apollo and is given as a commission to the LSP. Nevertheless, the profit before tax (PBT) remains the same in both models.

As we see below, there is a big swing in our capital commitments moving from an LSP-heavy model to a model favoring digital NBFCs

This strategy yielded significant results, leading to both scale and the creation of a high-quality book at Apollo. As seen below, the disbursements in Q3 and Q4 combined were almost 5X of the disbursements of Q1 and Q2 combined!

Further, the delinquency rates mentioned in Q4 were primarily from discontinued partners, and we anticipate significantly better loan quality in the coming quarters, much below the 1.98% 90-day delinquency rate noted in Q4.

Buoyed by the success of this plan, we launched a Non-Convertible Debenture (NCD) offering of ₹15 crores. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and we are confident that it will be fully subscribed within the next 30 days. This should facilitate further growth, and we expect to achieve a minimum of ₹100 crores in capital commitments from our partners by the first half of this financial year.

We believe the business has never been stronger, and the path to scale has never been clearer. With a robust strategy and committed partnerships, Apollo is poised for rapid growth and excellence in the digital lending space.

From RBI finally coming out with the new Digital lending guidelines to the funding freeze in the startup world: all have had significant ramifications in the digital lending universe. 

Let's go through this in detail. 

Ever since 2020, the Fintech world has been crying out for clear regulations in the digital lending world. Most digital lenders, big or small have been pulled in by various authorities questioning their modus operandi and the legitimacy of their operations. This has been an extremely painful exercise for founders. 

Most of them had no clue why they were being scrutinized. Given the amount of stress and pressure being applied many founders have ever since simply downed tools and stopped their digital lending operations completely. In the absence of clear regulations, it seemed everybody became the regulator of digital lending 

Thankfully RBI took note and has started to publish regulations specific to the digital lending industry. 

The gist of the regulations is as follows: 

• The regulated entities are responsible for the entire lifecycle of the loan and the actions of their LSP partners 

• Ensuring borrower protection against any undue harassment 

• Ensuring regulated entities are in control of the underwriting by limiting first loss guarantee (FLDG) from LSPs 

• Reporting of all loans to the credit bureaus and NPAs on the balance sheet of the regulated entities regardless of any commercial structures with their LSPs (FLDG)

These guidelines are great for the industry. 

• It finally announces to the world who the big daddy of digital lending is. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. RBI came in, stepped up, cleaned house, and brought everyone in line. It does not matter what your name is, RBI has ensured everybody knows their role in the ecosystem

  

• It spells out the rules for all involved in the industry. We fully expect these rules to keep evolving as the industry and RBI's understanding of this industry matures  

• It puts the industry back in build mode. Given the chaotic nature of the industry in the last couple of years, the industry had gone into survival mode. Many prominent players like ZestMoney, Avail, and Fairmoney, unfortunately, were not able to make it out in one piece. While it will take a few months for the industry to hit growth mode, it's encouraging to see the folks who survived these traumatic times go back to building value for their shareholders rather than simply protecting it. At the same time, we are thrilled to see a wave of new startups enter the digital lending industry. We need them and many more if we are to collectively achieve financial inclusion in this country!

While the regulations were specific to the digital lending industry, over the last 12 months, funding for startups has become far more constricted. 

This has been a result of a variety of factors but can largely be summarised below:

• Low-interest rates and high technology dependence during the Covid years led to significant funding for startups at rich valuations. Covid times truly presented a mirage for tech investors who mistook growth during a black swan event to be a permanent reality  

• Now with the rise in interest rates, investors have access to safer assets giving better returns and therefore have become extremely picky when investing in startups which by their very nature are risky beasts 

• Startups too have struggled in transitioning between high growth mode (high cash burn) to revenue/unit economics first companies

The RBI guidelines coupled with a funding freeze have had an interesting impact on the digital lending world

• Many software companies which had built significant distribution over the last few years are now moving fast to monetize their users by offering them loans. Revenue is priority 1  

• Lending companies have become a lot more risk-averse. The focus now is to only do loans that make money rather than past strategies which involved simply growing their loan book at the cost of portfolio quality 

• This coupled with the new digital lending guidelines where the regulated lenders (NBFC and banks) are regulatory required to show the NPA on their books regardless of any FLDG arrangements means there is a clear alignment between LSPs and their regulated lenders in creating a loan book which makes unit economic sense 

In our opinion, this is a much-needed mentality shift within the industry. Losing money endlessly while lending money makes little sense and is simply a hangover from the e-commerce playbook of deep discounting. Companies that imbibe these values deep within their culture will be companies that will exist a decade from now. This, in financial services, is the most critical north star: Building a high-quality company that endures for decades. To unlock true unfair advantages in financial services your company needs to inspire trust. This can only happen if you build A+ loan books over a long period of time. Whether you are in the digital lending world or the traditional lending world, there is no substitute for this playbook. 

Simply put: Vintage matters in financial services 

At Apollo, we have become a lot more stringent in LSP partnerships. Our goal is to limit ourselves to only high-quality partnerships. We follow a thorough due diligence process that involves 

• Financials and burn rate checks 

• Equity investor reference calls 

• Lender reference calls 

• Founder reference checks 

• Past loan portfolio checks 

Only once comfortable with each of these parameters, we progress towards issuing a term sheet to our partners describing the financial terms of our partnership. Every quarter this process is repeated to ensure our partners are moving in the right direction. Our goal is to do partnerships with fintechs where we believe there is long-term potential to create something of tremendous value together. For this, our values must align.

Over the last 5 years, we have worked with 50+ fintechs and done over 17 lakh loans. We use this rich experience in digital lending processes, underwriting, and technology to make the best decisions we can to build A+ partnerships with fintechs. We are extremely fortunate to be building a business that happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right team. Having built multiple companies before this one, I personally know how difficult it is to build a successful company. No matter how talented you or your team is, regardless of your track record, every single time you startup, it is very very hard to build something which actually works. Now that we have struck gold, we never take our success for granted, and nor do we give up in trying times. We will ride this baby to the very top!

We truly believe the digital lending world is now where e-commerce was in 2013: full of potential and ready for an explosion of growth. 

I am confident, digital lending in 2033 will be like e-commerce today in 2023: The new normal 

The world of finance thinks it's so cool to be full of jargons that it ends up complicating the simplest of things.This is our attempt at explaining what Apollo does to a 13-year-old with the hope that more people will hopefully get what we do. 

• In one line we are a ‘Digital Lending company’. Though, to a 13-year-old today, the concept of anything being done without tech might seem alien. Even today people have to go to a bank branch to take a loan, but at Apollo, we help people borrow money digitally. On the same lines as buying those cool Jordans online rather than standing in a queue at the Nike store.

What problem is digital lending solving?

• Get a loan at any time of the day- Pretty much like your mom’s kitchen, open 24*7 when you’re hungry

• Even someone sitting in a far-off village can borrow money with  no bank branch nearby- Similar to learning how to play the guitar from a teacher on Youtube

• Digital footprint helps in getting to know whom to lend to and whom not to- it’s like when your friend shares her Spotify playlist with you and you feel like you know her better now

• Now, not every company is allowed to lend. You need a license to lend which Apollo has (NBFC License) and RBI is our regulator. Think of RBI as our school Principal who has set out very clear rules that everyone with a license needs to follow. 

• At Apollo, we work with many technology companies that may or may not have a license to lend. These companies are already serving their customers using digital means. They know their customers way better than we know them. They could be in healthcare, education, e-commerce etc Since customers need money to use their services, these companies want to offer them digital loans and they take Apollo’s help to do so. 

How does this work?

• Now remember, since Apollo has the license to lend and also the expertise, the tech company shares its customer leads with Apollo. For the sake of an example let's assume Amazon is the company that wants to offer digital loans to its end customers. And Jay their customer (above 21 years) wants to buy a PlayStation 5 and is falling a little short of the budget. Since Amazon knows Jay well because he has shopped often, they know where they have delivered past orders and he has a good history as a customer they recommend Jay to take a loan from Apollo. Because Amazon has recommended Jay, it gives Apollo a lot more comfort than if Jay had directly approached Apollo. It’s like if a friend your parents trust is coming to a party, it's easier to get permission to go to that party. And Jay uses this loan to buy the PlayStation 5 digitally!

• What value do we add to the tech company? 

  • Capital to lend- So that they can use their own funds to focus on building their business

• Compliance- Since we know the RBI rules well, we ensure the loan is compliant and at places even make sure the tech company is compliant. We are like that annoying elder sister who sometimes just refuses to mind her own business

• Technology- All the interaction between us and them is via API’s which makes it way faster and scalable. Just like you, we also believe in- ’Who calls? Just message!’

• So to sum it up, we technically can't say we are building the future because this all sounds fundamental, right? Borrowing money online! So yes, we are building the present :) And we need to step up, cause your generation will expect way more from the lending industry before you turn 21.

In theory, it makes total sense. Fintechs bring the tech expertise, acquisition of customers and A + user experience while traditional lenders come in with lots of capital at competitive prices. This sounds like a heavenly combination. Then why is it that this always ends in hell? 

Well in 1 simple line: Competitors can never be partners 

Let’s dive deeper  

The problem

Here is what tends to happen 

• Fintechs approach traditional lenders 

• If lucky, they are able to convince them to partner up

• It takes months to integrate

• When the integration is complete, the Fintechs celebrate it as a huge milestone due to the effort it’s taken for them to get to this point 

• Partnership starts!

• Let’s talk worse case and best case scenario 

• Worst-case scenario: 

  • The loan book is poor quality and the traditional lender either shuts the partnership or cripples it by putting up minimal capital and lots of restrictions on the kind of loans which can be done by the Fintech

• Best case scenario: 

  • The loan book quality is great. The traditional lender gets excited. They want to scale up! It’s happy days for the Fintech right? Well…not exactly

• This is where the villain in the story comes in. Enter ‘The Executive’

• Who is ‘The Executive’? It’s that person in the traditional lending company who notices the meteoric rise of the Fintech on its book. He is the eye of the tiger!  

• This Executive then proceeds to ask his associates to study the Fintech closely. His team then peppers the Fintech with questions in the name of diligence. The unsuspecting Fintechs answer the questions innocently. The team determine the strategy and decode the Fintechs plans 

• Once done, they present it to The Executive. He now makes the call. The call is go directly after the customers of the Fintech and slowly and painfully cut them out of the loop 

• The lender partnerships manager knows what’s happening. He pleads with The Executive to reconsider as this would be the beginning of the end of their partnership with the Fintech. But this is to no avail. The Executive could not care less. 99% of the traditional lender’s business is direct lending. He is not going to let 1% of the business cloud his judgement on how to run the balance 99%  

• Boom! Armed with all knowledge, customers and strategy of the Fintech, the traditional lender becomes the Fintechs arch nemesis and competitor  

A bone-chilling tale isn’t it? 

This horror has been faced by more Fintech founders than they would like to admit. Popular banks and NBFCs who all were once the darlings of the Fintech world are now publicly calling open season on customers of their once prominent Fintech partners. 

What can Fintech’s do to battle this? 

The solution 

There are 3 options to solve this problem

Solution 1:

Fintechs need to get their own lending license. This acts as an insurance policy which allows them to compete with their partner lenders on an even footing. Simply having their own NBFC license acts as somewhat of a nuclear deterrent for their lenders. The lenders know that if they do something which is against the spirit of the partnership, the Fintech is not helpless. They would simply start doing the loans directly. This keeps the power equation balanced between the two 

Solution 2:

Now, Lord knows the number of Fintechs who have applied for an NBFC license to the RBI. If you are not feeling lucky, getting into a strategic equity partnership with an NBFC is another way to go. This has become an increasingly credible option for Fintechs, especially with lenders they have been working with for a while or plan to do deep integrations and share proprietary information with 

Solution 3:

Lastly getting into partnerships with lenders who are platforms and are committed to not directly lending to customers is another great option. Lenders like Apollo are neutral in nature. We do not lend directly to end borrowers and only lend via Fintech partners. At Apollo, partnerships are THE business. Our customers are Fintechs and going directly after our Fintechs customers would kill the platform. This makes our incentives aligned with our Fintechs. If they grow, we grow. This allows Fintechs to build with confidence knowing they won’t be suddenly backstabbed by their lender. They can focus on building an A+ user experience for the borrowers relying on the deep partnership with Apollo 

That’s why we are the ‘AWS of Digital Lending’ 

So back in February 2017 when RBI suggested that Reporting Entities(REs) of all four major regulators of the financials sector i.e. RBI, SEBI, IRDAI & PFRDA were to report to CERSAI (Central Registry of Securitisation Asset Reconstruction and Security Interest of India) - we went into a flurry🧙🏻‍♂️ hunting for the best 3rd party solution to automate our reporting and comply with this regulation right away

What we discovered was a toxic combination of poor technology and high costs making 3rd party solutions a nonstarter, especially for the nascent fintech industry

It was at this point in time, we were left with no choice but to build the solution ourselves 

At Apollo, we believe magic is at the intersection of A+ quality people, efficiently written code, and disciplined processes

Over the last few years, we have built out the CKYC reporting solution on this ethos. But before we go deeper, let’s understand the basics of CKYC

What is CKYC?                           

The Central Know Your Customer (C-KYC) 👩‍💻is an initiative by the Government of India which allows customers to complete their KYC once with any 1 regulated entity in the financial sector such that the KYC of the customer then becomes accessible to all other regulated entities in the financial sector 

Under the PMLA (Prevention of Money-Laundering) rules 2005, the CKYC registry will receive, store, safeguard and retrieve the KYC records in digital form for all citizens of India

For a Regulated Financial Institution, the objective is twofold: save time and effort 

• Repeated collection of customer information is not required

  • Documents from any customer do not have to be collected and stored repeatedly by different regulated entities if collected once and uploaded on the CKYC portal by any 1 regulated entity unless there is a change in the customer’s information

• Repeated verification of customer information is not required

  • Verification of customer-specific documents is not a repeating exercise anymore once it is verified and uploaded on the CKYC portal by any 1 regulated entity unless there is a change in the customer’s information

Most regulated entities manage this function of compliance through full-time resources who simply manually, slowly, and painstakingly do the necessary reporting on the CKYC portal

As a growing regulated entity, this is unsustainable. That’s where Apollo's CKYC APIs come in and save the day! 😮‍💨

How does CKYC work with Apollo’s APIs?

We have built an end-to-end solution 😎 for C-KYC reporting where we cover the following aspects involved in the reporting process: 

✅ Search 

✅ Download 

✅ Update

✅ Upload 

Let’s talk about each of these:

Search 

• The Regulated Entity will have the capabilities to search the details of its customers with the following documents: 

  • PAN Card

  • Aadhar Card 

  • Passport 

  • Voter ID card 

  • Driving License 

  • CKYC number

Download  

• The Regulated Entity will have the capabilities to search the details of its customers with the following combinations: 

  • CKYC + DOB

  • CKYC + Phone no

  • CKYC + Pincode + DOB year

Update   

• The Regulated Entity can update the details of its customer basis the variation between the already existing details and the latest documentation received

Upload  

• In the case of a customer not being on the central repository, the regulated entity can add their details and welcome them to the central database

Our competitive edge!

Subtly tooting our own horn 🎺: Apollo Finvest has been a regulated entity for 30+ years and in the Fintech space for 4+ years now!

In this time we have also worked with 50+ FinTechs, dealt with north of 10 Lac customers, and managed regulatory reporting fantastically time and again! 

To conquer CKYC we followed the following steps:

• We first built the APIs for our internal users 🤗 

• Ensured that we had built something that they truly loved ❤️

• Fortified the technology to handle the reporting of our high-volume loans 🦾

• Saw firsthand the benefits of automation and now we are bringing this solution to the rest of the regulated entities!  🧘🏻‍♂️

Simply put our APIs are :  

• Tested at scale ✨

  • We are our biggest clients and have tested the APIs repeatedly with our data to ensure that the product is fool-proof

• Future proof 🔮

  • Being a regulated entity ourselves, we will always have our eyes on any and all compliance developments and be the first to implement them

• Cheaper, faster, less error-prone reporting. Simply efficient 🏎

  • No huge upfront cost to go live! Simply integrate and pay as you go

  • No need to employ any full-time resources to manually do CKYC reporting

• Customizable 🥷🏻

  • Our tech-DNA ensures that the product is customizable as the user requires

Cheers to savings time, money, and effort 🍾

Reach out to divya@apollofinvest.com for a demo now!

Apollo Finvest was incorporated in the year 1985 by a legendary entrepreneur Mr Ramesh Innani who had very ambitious plans for the company 🦹‍♀️. He had an IPO, got the company listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, obtained an NBFC license from RBI and was on the path to take it to great heights until his untimely and unfortunate demise in 1996 💔

Fast forward to 2015, the company primarily invests its own equity capital in various asset classes. This was when I, Diksha, joined the company 😎. It felt like a vintage car covered in dust waiting for someone to take it out for a spin 🚗 

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Why did I join Apollo Finvest? 

At that point in my career, I was with HDFC Ltd which in car analogies would be considered to be the equivalent of a proven and sturdy German car 💪

During my stint there, I had written to Renu Karnad, the MD of HDFC Ltd asking her why in this day and age of technology every loan application was yet assessed on a physical paper and why were we taking a month to process our customer’s home loan applications? She was kind enough to acknowledge these challenges and encouraged me to bring about change at HDFC. I huffed and I puffed but making gigantic changes at a mammoth company was brutally difficult. I realised this could only be done if this was the number 1 priority of the company’s leadership team. This was not the case and I was eager to move faster ⚡️. That’s when I decided to take the bull by the horns and join Apollo Finvest

My first few years at Apollo were not easy, to say the least. 

Speed had a whole new meaning in Apollo then! I was scandalised when I saw that emails were dictated to and typed by an assistant and not sent out by the manager himself 😧. Was I dreaming of a Ferrari in a Maruti? 

I realised we had the infrastructure and the history. Infrastructure was key from a regulatory perspective and history taught us what did not work in the past if not what to do in the future. Apollo needed a spark✨ to bring it back to life. It needed a change in driver and a new direction 🧭

I started my mission with 2 things on my to-do list 

• Hire like-minded team members to support the new vision of the company 

  • Hiring at that point was critical and the most challenging thing to do 

  • Convincing amazing talent to join an old-school-looking company and making them believe we could together transform it was like selling a bag of magic beans 🫘 

  • But just like magnets, one likeminded hire followed another 👫

  • Parallelly things started getting too fast and furious 🏎 for the traditional folks in the company. There was a clear DNA transformation happening and while some people absolutely loved it, it just was not some people’s cup of tea. Before we knew it, we had a good mix of passionate young folks and experienced individuals👊 

  • It was clear that something was happening at Apollo. It was the first sign of a sea of change which was to follow 🌷

• Figure out the vision of the company 

  • Technology was disrupting 💣 every industry 

  • I had a hunch that financial services would be next. I had seen the need for this first hand with my stint at HDFC 🔮

  • This thesis started to have some legs when I started chatting with fintech founders across the country and understanding the challenges and opportunities they were seeing in the space. I learned that 

    • The only way to achieve financial inclusion in India was by infusing technology into financial services 🤖

    • Traditional banks were reluctant to work with Fintech’s 

    • If Apollo built the right technology infrastructure, we could become a key pillar in moving the industry forward 

  • To test out these theories, we decided to begin pilots with a few fintechs 

These pilots served as a great proof of concept. It told us 1 thing clearly: Apollo’s tech was a key attraction for Fintech’s to work with us. We needed to double down on this and convert this vintage car to a Tesla! 😎 

This is when I convinced Mikhil Innani, our company’s tech DNA, to take the driver’s seat and drive us full steam ahead into the future. And as they say, the rest is history 🤍

Our journey and experience from the early years at Apollo taught us many invaluable lessons. To mention a few: 

1. True change can happen ☀️ in any company but only if the leader believes in and drives the change themselves

2. Leaders need an A1 team with the right cultural wavelength to execute🤝

3. Every company needs to be adaptable to change. Business environments can change, and competition can change but if the company does not move with the times, it will go the way of the dinosaurs 🦖

At Apollo, as proud as we are of our present, we remind ourselves every day of our origins and ask ourselves the question: What are we building today to continue deserving a place in the future?

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With UPI, E-KYC, Digital signatures and a monumental jump in India’s internet penetration, the foundation for digital and omnipresent financial services is rock solid. 

The internet is helping us rapidly reach places where even the roads don’t go. Every app is becoming a distributor of financial services. Every mobile phone is becoming the customer’s personalised banking branch. Any company not optimising for this new reality is napping at the wheel. 

This is a critical moment in our country’s journey to financial inclusion. The technology infrastructure is going to only become better from this moment on. But as Uncle Ben said in Spiderman “With great power comes great responsibility“

Financial inclusion is hollow without ethical lending. One of the many important aspects of financial inclusion is enabling access for the majority to formal credit. 

From a borrower’s point of view, formal credit has many benefits. Some of them are listed below:

• Build a credit history for larger future loans

• Access to cheaper loans as borrower risk profile decreases

• Transparent pricing 

• Fair collection practices in case during collections

The informal lending space is notorious for borrower exploitation and so our focus today is on the last 2 points. 

With digital lending, we have the chance to bring a large chunk of informal sector borrowers into the formal lending space. With this huge opportunity, we also have a duty to dramatically improve the pricing and collections experiences for the borrowers. 

While the RBI, app store and play store have issued guidelines at different points in time, we wanted to not only compile them but add to them basis our experiences in digital lending for the last 5+ years. The philosophy was simple: Treat borrowers how we would want to be treated.

The goal here was to build a template that can be a reference point for all fintechs, especially those looking to enter digital lending. 

This is our initiative to bring more transparency and accountability to this space. We firmly believe delivering A+ borrower experiences is the key to loyal and happy customers. This is the foundation of a healthy lending business. 

Here is the link.

We will continue evolving these as we get feedback. Any suggestions on improving this document are welcome 🙏🏻

Apollo Finvest Q2, 2021-22 results are out🤩. In short: Best quarter ever 🏆

Building Apollo with Diksha has been an incredibly personal and rewarding journey. From our humble days of trying to find any kind of product-market fit in 2018 to now being at the epi-centre of the Fintech revolution in India.

Some crazy stats:

1. We make more profit today in 1 month than we did in the entire year of 2018 😳

2. Number of loans disbursed in only Q2, 2021-22 > The entire FY 2020 💥

3. Revenue for only half the year of 2021-22 > 1.5X the entire FY 2021 revenue 💫

4. Though loan book is not a parameter we chase, it is intriguing to note in the last 6 months, it has grown 4X 🔥

For the curious, here is our detailed deck 🤓

Covid was hard on a personal and professional level for all of us. In Q2, 2020-21 we scraped by with a profit of 44 lacs. It was a huge challenge. But as the famous saying goes it’s all about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Now in Q2, 2021-22 the team has made a roaring🦁 come back delivering the best quarter in the companies history with a profit of 3.4 Cr. In the world of startups, where everybody wants to 10X this and 10X that but to actually make 7X profits? This team is special🌟

Though these are early days, milestones like this give us the energy to build relentlessly. Never give up and never give in. Hardwork compounds!   

I could not be more proud of my co-founder Diksha and our entire team at Apollo. It’s a privilege of a lifetime to work with talented individuals like Harshal, Ajay, Zil, Prashant, Pranali, Fatema to name a few, who first and foremost are fantastic human beings🤗

Post covid, technology is moving at a blistering pace🏃 powered by a tsunami of venture capital empowering founders like never before. Fintechs on our platform have grown exponentially⚡️ and it’s an honour to have a chance to serve them every day.

This is the best part of my job: Working with A+ entrepreneurs who are constantly pushing the envelope and moving fearlessly into uncharted waters to redefine financial services in our country 🇮🇳. Every feature and user experience we build is our love letter to India’s fintech entrepreneurs❤️

The next big step for us is doubling down on our people. That is our secret sauce and our biggest treasure. Hiring is priority 1. We need to prepare the next generation of leaders to take the company to new heights🚀. Join us: https://angel.co/company/apollo-finvest-1/jobs

Enough talk. Back to work. All eyes on the customer👑!

It all started with Fintech 1.0 which was very much like Internet 1.0🦕. Think companies like OLX or Craigslist. Simply connecting the borrower and the lender with no control over the user experience.

This did not work for a variety of reasons. A few reasons are mentioned below:

• Poor experience for borrowers 😾

  • High rejection rates 

  • Tedious application process

  • If approved, they would either get rejected after a few days for a random reason or the disbursement of funds took days/weeks 

• Unsustainable unit economics for Fintechs and no Intellectual property 🧟

  • Cost of customer acquisition went through the roof since Fintechs had no idea on the kind of customers to be sourced 

  • Barebones commission of 1%-2% received from lenders for only approved leads 

  • All negative feedback of the borrowers were left on the Fintech’s app slowly killing its brand and trust index

  • Unable to create proprietary lending products or cater to customers outside the spectrum of traditional lenders 

• Amazing for Lenders 🤑

  • Received leads for free 

  • Only paying Fintechs commission in the case of an approved lead 

  • Complete control over the customer experience, underwriting, and collections 

  • Pay the Fintech once for the borrower and then continue cross-selling other Financial services to the borrower for free in the future 

This model has slowly given way to Fintech 2.0🌟. This is very much like Internet 2.0 where companies like Flipkart and Amazon operate on a mixed marketplace model.

Just like Amazon who enables other merchants to sell on its platform along with its close partners like Cloudtail and allows other products to sell on its platform along with its own products like Amazon basics, Alexa, etc, Fintechs are now not only connecting the borrowers and the lenders but in about 30-40% of the cases also controlling the entire user experience by participating in the underwriting, the collections, and product creation activity too through close partnerships with NBFC’s like Apollo Finvest.

The Fintech 2.0 model solves for many of the deficiencies we saw in the Fintech 1.0 model specifically for Borrowers and Fintechs 

• Better Experience for Borrowers since Fintech’s participate in the underwriting and collections 🥰

  • Higher approval rates 

  • Easier application process 

  • Money received by the borrowers in a matter of hours if not instantly 

• A+ unit economics for Fintechs thanks to larger control over their lending ecosystem and creation of Intellectual property 🚀

  • Lower cost of customer acquisition since Fintech’s now have a clear idea of the type of customers to acquire

  • Commission’s driven model changed to a profit-sharing model where margins for Fintechs can be as high as 15%-20%. Game-changing! 

  • Positive experience for borrowers results in great app reviews leading to the creation of a trustworthy and positive Fintech brand  

  • Ability to create unique lending products and cater to customers outside the spectrum of traditional lenders. This allows Fintechs to innovate!

Slowly but surely, Fintech’s are taking more and more control over their ecosystem. While most start at 30-40%, leaving the rest of their marketplace to the Fintech 1.0 model, we are seeing Fintechs completely flip that ratio to having majority control in their marketplace to even 100% control💪🏻 and abandoning the Fintech 1.0 model completely 

The next stage of evolution 

But there’s something much much more interesting brewing in the Fintech world today🔮. Platforms like Zomato, Swiggy, Ola, Uber, Flipkart, Amazon, Apple, etc. are gearing up to enter the Fintech space. They are sensing an opportunity that aligns beautifully with their core businesses and takes advantage of their platform strengths and positioning🧑🏻‍🔬. If done right, Fintech can be used to supercharge their businesses and drive the next generation of growth. We call this Fintech 3.0. Here Fintech’s will not only control the underwriting, collections but also where and how efficiently the capital is deployed 😯 

Let’s break this down with an example 

Let’s talk about a company on everybody’s lips today, Zomato🍔

• Zomato’s north star metric is the number of order’s delivered every day. The higher this number, the better their business does🕊

• Like most large internet platforms, the top 10-20% restaurants serve 70-80% of the orders coming in on Zomato 

• Zomato of course knows which are the top 10%-20% performing restaurants on its platform.

• Zomato needs revenue to justify its valuation. For this, Zomato has to grow. If Zomato has to grow, the restaurants on its platform must process more orders. If restaurants have to process more orders, they need more capacity. For more capacity, they need working capital and scale. This is where Zomato comes in👀 

• Capital is the easy part. Zomato’s secret sauce would be to help restaurants scale using data. For example: A certain pizza place doing well in a certain part of Mumbai would do great even in a certain part of Delhi. This is the power of the Zomato platform analytics⚡️ 

• To put the icing on the cake🧁, Zomato won’t need to provide capital to restaurants. You see, the growth requirements of most restaurants are largely similar. Think spaces, equipment, staff, etc. Zomato will strike bulk deals with suppliers and pay them directly on behalf of the restaurants. In this way, Zomato will not only ensure restaurants scale but scale efficiently thanks to Zomato’s economies of scale 

• Zomato controls order’s coming into these restaurants through its app. Using this data, Zomato knows the future order’s a restaurant is likely to receive. If a restaurant is financially powered by Zomato, it could further boost their ranking on the app to attract more orders for the restaurant. This solves for “Ability to pay”💰

• Zomato collects the money from the customers and pay’s the restaurant. Zomato has the ability to deduct a portion of every transaction to pay for the financing/infrastructure they have provided the restaurant. This solves for “Intent to pay”😇

• Further, imagine a restaurant is given this infrastructure and does not perform well, Zomato would simply replace the restaurant with another restaurant on its platform, and the infrastructure continues being utilized 🥶

• Lastly, to further flex their muscles, Zomato could demand exclusive arrangements with restaurants in exchange for scaling their operations significantly. Restaurants would jump at this offer like a kid on a Mcdonald’s Sundae🍦. Restaurants have no loyalty to Zomato or Swiggy. They would happily be exclusive with a platform if it would provide them with attractive growth infrastructure and ultimately more money 

• As all marketplaces evolve, exclusive supply will become more and more important to differentiate against competitors🤴🏻 

This example can be taken across any platform🌅 

Over the next decade, platforms will be the best lenders to their ecosystem participants. Platforms will provide the most efficient path to growth forming a win-win relationship with their ecosystem participants🤗 

Smart platforms will not enter lending to simply make interest income. Net interest margins (NIM’s) are a banks game. Synergies🦄 where 1+1 > 2 is where these mega-platforms operate. Companies like these will only enter lending if it kills the friction to grow their platform. It’s simply a means to an end 

A tsunami of capital 🌊 about to enter the Fintech world with such structures and forever change the landscape of lending. Of course, in order to do this, platforms will require a world-class lending stack. This is where Apollo Finvest comes in. The Apollo stack enables ANY company to start digital lending in 48 hours. We provide the complete lending infrastructure: The license, tech, and the capital and as is evident in this post, we are extremely bullish on platform lenders going into the next decade

Many people ask us for our predictions on the digital lending ecosystem. So we leave you with this: 

The Future Order of power in the Digital Lending landscape🪄 

• Platform Lenders like Zomato, Ola, Uber, Swiggy, Amazon, Apple, etc

• Payment gateways 

  • Payment gateways will provide Revenue Based Financing to the long tail  i.e. the balance 80% of merchants operating on the internet platforms like the ones mentioned above 

• Vertically specialized Fintech lenders 

  • Fintech’s focussed on specific use cases or borrowers. For example: Lending to Instagram/Youtube bloggers, D2C Online brands, Truck drivers, etc.

• Horizontal/General Purpose Fintech Lenders

The pandemic has exposed the fragility of our healthcare ecosystem. The desperate tweets, WhatsApp forwards, lack of hospital beds, absence of medication, vaccines, and the flood of lifeless bodies are scars that none of us will forget 😿

This will result in 2 things:

• A brain drain: A set of folks convinced that there is no point to live in a country like India. They will begin making plans to leave the country.

• Second, it will give rise to revolutionaries, a set of folks who will rise from the ashes of this calamity to build scalable infrastructures so that their children never have to go through what they went through 💥

With PharmEasy, I was fortunate to co-found a category-defining company in the Healthcare space. Seeing the turmoil over the last year, though I am confident they will be one of the champions 🌟 we need for this re-build, I am certain they cannot do it alone. We need more players to step up.

Financial Inclusion

The more I think about it, Financial inclusion becomes a fundamental ⚓️ and core aspect of this re-build. We cannot continue to be ok with 90% of India being outside the rails of formal credit. We have built a credit ecosystem that simply apes the West rather than building for our citizens.

One may ask why have banks excluded 90% of India🙀?

Here’s why: Most of India requires and can afford loans of only up to Rs 15,000. Most banks do not sanction loans of less than Rs 100,000.

Why? Well, the cost for processing a loan for a bank is ~ Rs 4000. This includes the cost of customer acquisition, paperwork, credit underwriting cost, etc. The unit economics of a Rs 15,000 loan does not make sense for a bank.

We need a fundamental re-think 🧠

We need a category-defining company in the Financial services space 🚀. The gauntlet has been thrown down⛈!

Without this, we take away any chance of growth for 90% of India. Without credit to build their dreams, they are stuck living in mediocrity

Luckily we have a solution & its called Digital Lending🤖

Using Digital Lending the cost of processing a loan can be reduced up to 80% ⬇️ Further, over the next decade, we will see the rise of aggregators and platforms as lending companies. For them, the cost of customer acquisition is zero. This is a game-changer 🧨 and a rabbit hole we will go down in a future blog post.

Digital Lending Ecosystem

It’s yet very early days in the digital lending ecosystem. Today it’s like 2007 in eCommerce and the Flipkart’s and Amazons are just getting going 🐣

First Fintech companies acted purely as lead generators for traditional lenders with no say in underwriting or collections. The loan products were the same as those offered by traditional lenders🦖. Think of these companies as Fintech 1.0. They were similar to Internet 1.0 companies like Craiglist. Simply connecting 2 parties with no control over the experience.

Now we are seeing the evolution of the ecosystem. Companies are building proprietary underwriting models and owning collections. The financial products offered by them are unique and tailor-made to the needs of their end borrowers 🤩. Traditional lenders with their legacy technology and rigid frameworks are unable to support these products and Fintechs are collaborating with tech-first NBFC’s like Apollo Finvest. These are Fintech 2.0 companies. Very similar to Internet 2.0 companies like Amazon. Connecting 2 parties with strong control over the user experience.

In the future, Fintechs will go 1 step further. Aggregators and platforms will start lending to their merchants to facilitate growth on their platforms. Fintechs will not only control the underwriting and collections but also where and how efficiently the capital is deployed 😯. This kind of growth capital will unlock synergies where 1+1 will equal more than 2. We expect to see a tidal wave of capital 🌊 enter Fintech with such structures and forever change the landscape of lending.

Just like in 2021, as eCommerce has become the default way to shop for many users, the same will be true for digital lending in 2030. By then, the majority of the loans will be processed digitally. Bank branches will be like post offices today 🔮

Our Mission and looking ahead

At Apollo Finvest our mission is the democratization of credit and enabling financial inclusion🤗. Financial inclusion is as basic as electricity and a fundamental pillar to the future growth of our country. We are building the foundational rails for the next generation of lending companies 😻

As for the Apollo team, I could not be more proud 🤗. We went completely remote 🏝 in early March 2020 and have not been back in the office since. We took this call to keep the safety and health⛑ of our team as our number 1 priority but the fact that we have been able to do so without drops in performance is due to the A+ attitude of our team members coupled with the phenomenal organizational skills of our leaders🤓. Despite being a startup, we have always been thorough with our planning, processes, and documentation. We think writing and detailing our ideas brings clarity of thought and makes execution that much easier 📝. This aspect of the company’s working culture has shone through over the last year and helped us operate smoothly in a remote environment.

We have built an incredible foundation so far. In the coming year, we will be focused on building out the team to drive the next generation of 10X growth for the company🎸. This will be in the form of 3-4 key hires 🦸🏻 . If you would like to jump on board this space ship🛸 please reach out to me or apply here

The key numbers to sign off 2020

Finally, to end the financial year, I’d like to thank our believers: Our customers and Investors!

Customers for believing in our platform to build their fintech and investors for believing we would have customers 😹. A lot of you will be surprised to know that we are a public listed company with over 5000 amazing shareholders. This is my first time building a public company and I have been overwhelmed with the passion of our shareholders. Thank you for the inspiration and encouragement. Now, without any further ado, here are the key number’s for Apollo FY21

For the curious, here is our detailed deck 🤓

Stay healthy and stay safe 🙏🏻

This deep-rooted desire comes from our obsession with superheroes. We grew up watching Captain Planet 🌎, Power puff girls and to this date are first in line to watch every single Marvel or DC superhero movie 🦹‍♀️. Funnily enough, even our Loan Management System is named after a superhero called⚡️Sonic.

Superheroes inspire us and we take every single opportunity to be just like them. At Apollo, we’ve channeled this inspiration by supporting and evangelizing women's empowerment 👭. We started by developing and fostering a diverse team and now are proud to take the next steps in this journey. 

Today we are happy to announce our support for girl’s education. With this endeavor, our goal is to help educate young girls and give them access to something we were fortunate enough to have at their age. Education has a multiplier effect 🌱 on the growth of families, communities, and countries! As the saying rightly goes ‘If you educate a girl, you educate the future💫.

We are so pleased, humbled, and honored to have sponsored & partnered with these 3  highly passionate and super impactful organizations. Our interactions with them left us in awe and made us realize that they are the true real-world superheroes 🤍

Milaan Foundation

• Milaan, in its 13 years of existence has educated and empowered 40,000 children in 4 states in India. Its Girl Icon programme selects girl leaders at the grass-root level delivering education and instigating collective social actions on issues that affect adolescent girls. 

• This project creates young girl leaders within a community or village who act as support systems to many other girls around them. 

Nanhi Kali 

• Nanhi Kali supports girls from low-income families to complete ten years of formal schooling; the project has impacted the lives of over 450,000 girls (called Nanhi Kalis) from underserved communities across the country.

• A disturbing majority number of girls usually drop out of school when they reach secondary school due to reasons such as child marriage, menstruation, and other such social pressures. This project is an afterschool program to fill in the gaps in these girls' formal education and they have been very successful in ensuring that young girls do not drop out of schooling early on. 

Parinaam Foundation

• Conceived in 2006, the Parinaam Foundation works with urban low-income communities to bring them out of poverty through financial literacy and social inclusion.

• The foundation believes that lower-income communities in urban areas face many social and psychological issues due to the clear disparity in wealth they see around them. This project focuses on uplifting girls from such communities in urban areas by supporting their education.

If you or your organization are in a position to help these little angels in the smallest way possible please do reach out to them and help make a difference 💙. You can be a superhero too!

• When you're on the fast track of life, time absolutely flies. So every now and then I like to look back at our journey. It helps put things in perspective, recall experiences, things we got right and mistakes from which we learned from along the way

• Today I would like to talk about one of the things I am proud to say we got right. This is the Diversity ✨ in our team. A team which is well balanced with an equal number of men and women! 

• This is a topic which is very close to my heart 💗. Its benefits are something I am very passionate about and I am so happy to have been able to build it into the cultural tapestry and foundation of our company

• Here are some interesting facts 🤓 about us 

  • 60% of Apollo’s team comprises of women

  • 40% of our Board has women

  • Our largest Shareholder is a woman

  • A woman single-handedly started building our tech platform, while she was pregnant. She worked like a superwoman pretty much until the day she delivered a beautiful girl into the world 

  • When we started building Apollo, for the first couple of months, we had a team of only women employees!

• I know what you must be thinking. These points seem women-centric. That does not seem very diverse. Well, this is intentional

• Today there is a clear and distinct lack of women in the workforce. If we want to achieve diversity, we must solve this problem ✊🏻

How did we do this?

• This is one of the most common questions I am asked and well the answer to this is quite simple really: Diversity starts at the very top 🚀

• At Apollo, the founding team is a man and a woman. With such a starting point, the rest just came organically

• Diversity is not something that we actively planned or hired for

• When we were starting our company, our focus like any other early-stage company was on only 1 thing: Finding product-market fit. Nothing else mattered! 🤺

• Most of the initial hiring was led by me and I had a simple goal: Find the best talent for the role

• Now when I reminisce, I think it’s because I was a woman and one who was fortunate to have been brought up in a family where men and women contributed equally both professionally and personally, I was subconsciously making decisions resulting in a well-balanced team 🧘🏻‍♀️

• In fact, I was only made to realise this phenomenon in our team composition when we had a visitor in our office one day who pointed out how impressed he was to see this especially in a tech startup

How has this helped us? Let’s talk about specific areas in the company

• Product

  • One of the goals of the Apollo platform is to accelerate financial inclusion 🌈

  • As per the Indian census, 48% of the population in India are women

  • In fact, between the 2 gender’s, one can argue the need and opportunity to build products for the financial inclusion of women is larger than that of men

  • Even leaving that aside, if you aim to cater to a market with this level of diversity, is it not wise to build a product incorporating the sensibilities and tastes of your ultimate target market? 🤔

  

  • At Apollo, we have seen immense benefits in our product thanks to our diversity. The holistic thinking it brings to building out product roadmaps, prioritisation, feature feedback sessions to the user experience is absolutely invaluable. It really helps eliminates blind spots 👓

  • When you allow only one gender to build a product, it subconsciously gets built with a bias towards that gender. This alienates customers from the opposite gender. Let me explain with an example I read in the book -The Moment of lift by Melinda Gates 

    • Ever wondered why most of the video games back in the day were either about car racing, shooting, fighting etc?

    • This is because the gaming industry back then was primarily dominated by men 

    • This resulted in games being created by boys for boys

    • This completely ignored the opposite gender’s taste leaving a huge uncatered gap in the industry

  • Not only is this unfair to the opposite gender, it’s just a straight-up bad business decision. A lack of diversity in your team can make you lose a huge chunk of your potential customers! 🙀

    perfect way to build for a market is to have the end-user base within your company. A team who truly emphasizes with the customers needs always builds the best product

• Hiring & Retention

  • Apollo’s diversity has given us a clear unfair advantage in hiring

    

  • How? Well, its human tendency to look for familiar faces and cultural wavelengths when we decide who to be friends with or what social group we would like to be a part of. The same physiological behaviour applies when we look for our next workplace and company

  • With a strong presence of women in the team, Apollo tends to attract more women to join us 🤗. This is a virtuous cycle with a strong multiplier effect. This just keeps growing stronger and stronger over time

  

  • By default, this X factor gives Apollo access to a much larger talent pool. In a competitive marketplace, this kind of DNA is a powerful magnet as we scale our team from strength to strength 💪🏻

  • Equally important, a well-balanced team leads to substantially better talent retention as well. Most companies don't realise it, but they are driving away potential and current talent because of imbalances in the team. Nobody wants to be the odd one out and if you don’t make them feel at home, they will leave 👽

  

  • These subtle but critical factors play an important role for employees choosing their next job and become subconscious reasons for quitting their current jobs 

• Culture

  • Men and women are simply wired differently. What women bring to the table, men don’t and vice versa 

  • Women are known to have higher Emotional Intelligence 🧏🏻‍♀️ and this gives them the ability to recognize, communicate and relate with emotions they feel in others or themselves 

  

  • This is a huge enabler for fostering a culture where it is normal to communicate about what’s on your mind 

  • At Apollo, our teams communicate much more freely within themselves and are more open to speak about their likes and dislikes. I think this has a lot to do with the women in our team

  • As the leadership team, we can rest easy knowing that if something is wrong in the company morale or sentiment, we will be made aware of it 🎉

  

  • Even with our partners, the communication is strong, clear and regular. It’s this human connection that helps establish a strong and trustworthy bond between 2 companies 💃🏻

  • Finally, the temperament of women and men varies widely 👀. In teams with diversity, it's often this balance that we have noticed helps in much more rational decision making and increased probabilities of establishing successful external partnerships

Why can’t this be every company’s secret sauce?

• One of my motivations for writing this piece was to clearly outline the advantages that diversity brings to the table 

• If there’s one ☝️ takeaway I would like people to have from this mini case study, it is this: Bring diversity in your leadership and decision making team

  

• This is a game-changer ⚡️. It unlocks opportunities, possibilities and perspectives you simply did not know even existed 

• This move has the potential to drive the next wave of growth 💥 in your business. It will help you explore, understand, and build for markets which your existing teams just cannot either recognize or empathically build for

• I hope our experiences encourage more companies and leaders to consciously think of adding this magic formula 🧙🏻‍♀️ in their team

• If there’s anything you would like to know more about or have specific questions regarding getting going on this mission, please let me know. Now go out and let’s execute this! Remember: Diversity is your next Superpower!  

Regards,

Diksha Nangia
CFO & Director

• Through this journey, we had the following insights and experiences

  • The fintech ecosystem lacks a base layer technology infrastructure which is dependable and world-class 🙇🏼

  • This results in most fintechs having to either build basic tools again and again or use sub-par platforms meant for traditional lending 🤦🏻

  • A prime example of this is the Loan Management System (LMS) for digital lending 

  • Every fintech we worked with either 

    • Used Excel sheets or

    • Built an LMS from the ground up or

    • Adopted a sub-par external LMS meant for traditional lending 😳

• One of the problems we had at Apollo was that in order to work with a wide gamut of fintechs and support all their products we needed a world-class highly customisable LMS which was built to be digital lending first 🤔

• After a few demo’s and scouring the market for options we realised, all external LMS’s had the following problems

  • Meant for traditional Lending 🦖

  • Extremely complicated 

  • Insane pricing meant for large banks and NBFC’s with books of over 500cr 

  • Prevented cloud-based access and required active infrastructure management 😷

  • Lacked flexibility in the loan products and workflows they supported 

  • Lacked third-party integrations with the most popular third-party service providers like payment gateways, KYC providers etc required for digital lending 

• This meant, we had to build an LMS from the ground up and it had to solve all the above problems if we were to be successful in working with and supporting a variety of fintechs. And we did just that! 🧙🏻‍♀️

• Over the last 3 years, we have built, iterated, scaled with Sonic across 50+ fintechs 🦾 

• Sonic is built on the foundation of the following core principles 

  • Ease of Use ✨

    • Sonic is inspired by apps we use on our smartphone every day

    • The iconography and typography focuses on keeping experiences familiar with no training required 

    • Even onboarding on Sonic is done by a dedicated onboarding expert who sets up and migrates you to Sonic seamlessly

  

  • Plug and Play. No coding required 🤖

    • Sonic is meant to deliver ROI instantly and enables you to go live in under 3 working days!

    • You can get started with Sonic without disturbing or requiring an engineering team

  

  • Speed and Scale ⚡️

    • Every action on Sonic happens in under 100-200 ms

    • This was critical to make all actions feel instant and make the user feel productive 

    • Sonic is built with scale at its core. Today it supports 30+ fintechs actively lending with Apollo using Sonic

      

  • Flexibility 👩🏻‍🎨

    • Sonic comes built-in with a variety of loan products and can support custom one’s as well so you can offer the perfect product for your customer. This includes but is not limited to Personal loans, Micro loans, Consumer loans, SME loans, Line of credit etc.

    • Similarly the loan stages on Sonic are customisable as per your requirements

    • You can bring your existing workflows into Sonic

    • Sonic adapts to you and not vice versa!

  

  • Workflow and Credit automation 👨🏻‍🔬

    • Our goal with Sonic is to focus your attention on qualified borrowers 

    • You can build credit rules into Sonic or connect Sonic to an external rule engine to automate your credit underwriting and fast track your loan processing by filtering out unqualified borrowers

    

    • With Sonic, you can even automate workflows between loan stages basis any criteria of your choice 

      • For example, if a borrower has performed E-KYC, you can skip the manual KYC verification step and move the loan automatically onto the next stage thus saving time and operations effort 

  • Built-in third-party integrations 🕺🏻

    • Sonic comes built-in with all the popular third-party integrations required for digital lending

    • Right from payment gateways like Razorpay, Cashfree, Instamojo to service providers like Karza, Hyper verge, Khosla Labs, Trusting Social etc. All these integrations come prebuilt into Sonic

    • Simply flick a switch to turn on the integration!

  

  • Community driven & continuously improving 🌟

    • Sonic is constantly evolving thanks to the 30+ fintechs actively lending using Sonic

    • We cherry-pick the best features the community builds on top of Sonic and make them available for everyone

      • This includes popular reports, third party integrations, User management profiles, loan products etc.

      • Pretty much every aspect of Sonic is pushed forward constantly by its community 

    • Our goal is to kill reinvention of the wheel in the fintech space so companies can focus on truly innovative and IP creating products

  

  • Security and audit-ability 👮🏻‍♂️

    • Every action taken on a loan in Sonic is logged

    • These logs are immutable. They cannot be deleted or modified

      • Auditing any loan to see how it transversed your system is easy and every action can be re-traced

    • All data on Sonic is constantly backed up and never deleted

      • So in case you or your team member accidentally delete any loan information on Sonic, it can be restored in a jiffy!

    • Sonic comes built-in with User Access Management 

      • You can decide what parts of Sonic are accessible to which user

      • Additionally, it comes pre-built with multiple user types like Auditor, Credit Appraiser, Business Associate etc so setting up user profiles is a breeze

• Over the last 6 months, we’ve been running a private beta of Sonic with fintechs who have been already lending on the Apollo platform and the response has been phenomenal 

• We are so excited to finally make Sonic available for all Fintechs now! This means whether you are lending on the Apollo platform or not, you can take full advantage of Sonic and take your Loan Management game to the next level! 👀

• Sonic is a continuation of our mission of building the Operating System for Digital Lending and lowering the barriers of entry for any company to start digital lending in under 48 hours! ✊🏻

• As always, if you are a Fintech and 

  • Sonic sounds like the perfect match, please reach out and we would love to show you a demo! 🤗

  • Apollo sounds like the digital NBFC you are looking for, please reach out and we would love to chat!

• Apollo will continue breaking down every aspect of digital lending into modules and easily accessible API’s. We have a few exciting announcements coming over the next few quarters. Watch this space! 🚀

• Service providers of digital tools for lending 😓 —> 🤸‍♂️

  • Before COVID-19, while some fintechs did adopt them, others saw them as non-essential

  • Most traditional lenders did not take this segment seriously

    • Their business was going well without needing any such tools for digitization. It was nice to have and much lower in the order of priority 

  • This is not true anymore. This is their moment to shine 🚀

  • Every fintech and traditional lenders would be flocking to them to get their digital workflow act together

  • If these companies play their cards right, it could and should be their demonetization moment

    • Once the lending is back in full swing, they could see the fruits of their labor and see unprecedented growth trajectories 

      

  • They need to get their pricing right, keeping in mind high LTV, and build a trustworthy brand

  • This moment could establish them as critical cogs in the workflow of digital loans 

  • These companies should work hard to grab market share and make themselves the default company to go to in their respective spaces 

  • The stars are aligned here for them to have a low cost of customer acquisition and high customer lifetime value 

• Something new 🧙‍♂️

  

  • At its core, COVID-19 has broken the trust protocol which was implicit between 2 entities 

  • There are multiple examples of these instances 

    • Parents refusing to pay school fees

    • Tenants refusing to pay rent

    • Consumers who have taken cars/bikes/furniture on long term rentals and refusing to pay

  • At its core, is a lack of fear on the repercussions due to the long-drawn legal processes which plague India

  • So while some entities will no doubt take up matters legally, the rest will be left biting the dust. This annoyance and frustration is being channeled sharply by certain entities 

  • We are seeing a huge tidal wave of interest of companies in the rental, education and real estate segment to convert their existing structures into “loan agreements” because

    • They are tired of running after money owed to them and the lack of consequences for delayed or complete lack of payments

    • They want their customers to know the payments are being recorded on the bureau and delayed payments will adversely impact their “trust“ score

    • The legal protocols involving loans are much more efficient than standard agreements between 2 parties 

  • While this trend has been accelerated by COVID-19, there has always been a problem in India regarding getting invoices and bills paid on time

    • For example, large Indian companies are traditionally notorious for delaying payments for months to their suppliers or service providers 

  • There is a tremendous opportunity we see here for evolving the current trust score of every company and individual basis every transaction that they participate in. I am talking about the bureau score

  • While countries like the USA already incorporate rentals and bill payments within the credit score of entities, unfortunately, this is yet not part of the credit ratings in India

  

  • We are headed into a future 🔮 where the trust scores will be tied to every transaction and open to everyone to see 

  • Imagine a world where you don’t have to second guess before doing a deal with someone and you are confident that every party will act basis the legal agreements which have been signed else face long term consequences in the manner of dropping trust scores leading to fewer entities wanting to transact with them leading to reduced business 

  • Good actors will have high trust scores leading a larger number of entities wanting to transact with them leading to a flourishing business for the good actor 🤝

  • Ultimately a system like this, if built correctly, would improve the ease of doing business

  • Prosperity within a community is directly proportional to the median trust score within that community

Phew! That was long 😅

Thanks for staying till the bitter end. If you are a fintech or looking for an exciting role in the fintech ecosystem please reach out. We are hiring for roles in Business & Engineering. Details here: https://angel.co/company/apollo-finvest-1/jobs

February 2020, we completed 2 years of building the Apollo Finvest platform. How did this start, why and what are we building towards?

Let’s start at the beginning:

In around December 2017, my entrepreneurial itch was acting up. Hotstar was getting acquired by Disney and I felt my journey there was coming to an end. To be honest, I always wanted to go back to building my own company at some point. Fintech was the talk of the town and the thesis made sense. A huge population without access to financial services and a big tailwind with the government promoting the usage of UPI and digital payments.

Before entering any space, I do like to ask myself the following question: What is the unfair advantage that my company could potentially have in the space. Straight of the bat, we had access to 3 things

• A public-listed NBFC efficiently managed by my co-founder, Diksha, who had a solid lending background with HDFC

• My technology background

• Decent capital base to take this off the ground

The big question was: What role should we play in the ecosystem? Most fintech companies we came across were in the lending space. At this point, we began doing 2 things

1) A pilot of providing unsecured loans. The goal here was to get our hands dirty and learn the nuts and bolts of lending. We did this in 2 spaces

• Unsecured personal loans

• Loans for customers buying goods and services at the point of sale. This is what the industry calls subvention loans

2) I started speaking to as many fintech lending founders I could connect with. I was relentless and reached out through LinkedIn messages, emailing their customer support and getting introductions through common connections. The goal was to learn from their experiences and understand what’s working and what’s not

Insights

It took us almost 7 months into doing the above 2 things to have the following insights

1) We had no unfair advantage when it came to doing direct lending

2) At least 20 other fintechs were offering the same products to customers like us. I found no reason why we would be able to do a better job.

3) Financial services as a whole was going to be huge. Every company where any kind of transaction is taking place would, over the next 10 years, build a financial service vertical. The reasons were apparent:

• They had better access to proprietary data and cash flows of the borrower. Other lenders could not have that

• It would encourage participants to grow their business on the platform. A win-win scenario made possible by powering their growth through capital

• It would build another powerful channel of revenue for the company

• It would inspire loyalty within their existing workforce and attract more folks to build a robust supply-side pool

• They could provide a user experience which is far more superior than traditional lenders

• There would be multiple digital lenders in the industry of all shapes and sizes focused on different verticals

4) The demand for credit was insatiable

5) The industries biggest pain point was the infrastructure

5a) Lack of tech-first NBFC’s to partner with

• Traditional lenders were not interested in partnering with fintechs in a meaningful way. The opportunity was just not enticing enough for them

• Even if they agreed to partner there was absolutely no flexibility to build innovative products and the technology integration took 6–8 months

5b) The whole industry was building the same tools again and again because there were no solid and affordable white-labelled technology solutions that they could use

The infrastructure point stayed with me. Unless this was solved, it was very difficult for cutting edge and innovative fintechs to be built. At this point, we asked ourselves whether we wanted to be one of the many digital lenders or build a platform that powered the next generation of fintechs. Being a technologist, the answer was clear to me. Many people could do lending better than us but when it came to building a highly scalable world-class technology platform, I backed myself to do a great job at it. We immediately stopped any direct lending of our own. We did not want to compete with digital lenders.

Our mission became clear: Build the ‘AWS of Lending’. Our mantra was simple: Enable any company to begin offering digital loans in under 48 hours.

Building plug and play API’s

The journey began to build the ‘AWS of Lending’.

This required modularising and breaking down every aspect of digital lending into easily accessible API’s. This included

• Customer acquisition tools

• Consumer-facing app

• Plug and Play NBFC API’s

• Credit underwriting API’s

• Credit bureau rule engine

• Alternate data from smartphones

• Alternate data from external data points

• Fraud Check API’s

• Digital KYC API’s

• Compliance and Regulatory checks

• Digital Loan agreements

• Credit Insurance API’s

• Loan Management System

• All existing LMS systems are built for traditional lenders and are unfortunately priced as such. Unaffordable and overkill for fintechs

• And Honestly, their user experience sucks. It’s overly complicated and bloated with non-essential features

• Disbursement API’s

• Credit bureau Reporting

• Collection API’s

• Loan Securitisation

• Asset reconstruction i.e. selling your bad loans

• Capital to grow your business as you scale

The above pretty much describes the Operating System of Digital Lending.

Over the long horizon of time, our goal is to build all these offerings such that they were easily is accessible through a plug and play API on the Apollo Platform.

We are doing this through a combination of both internal and external products all integrated together seamlessly on the Apollo platform. Our goal is not to reinvent the wheel but make it all work smoothly together on a single platform so that fintechs don’t have to struggle with multiple integration partners and figuring out what is best in class. Apollo is a curated platform containing both internal and external products that have been tested thoroughly by us at scale.

Working with 30+ fintechs in the country gives us a unique position in the value chain. Every week there’s something new being built on our platform by our fintech partners who are always pushing the envelope on what’s possible. Our scale coupled with a constant feedback loop from fintech’s helps us iterate faster and build a robust platform.

What’s next?

As we keep building the Apollo Infrastructure, it will get more and more easier to launch digital lending verticals for a company. The barriers to entry will drop. Just like AWS has made it possible to launch internet apps in a matter of hours. This will open the flood gates to innovation. This infrastructure is not only useful for new-age fintechs but also existing traditional lenders whose DNA is not technology. They are stuck with frustrating software built 20 years in the past giving them little to no flexibility. Our plug and play stack will allow them to be far more nimble and open to new age products and customer experiences. Apollo will be the platform to build the future of digital lending not only for cutting edge internet companies but also for traditional lenders.

It's been a crazy time to be in the digital lending space over the last few months. The Yes bank debacle, COVID 19 virus and the RBI moratorium have hit the industry hard. The repayments are likely to be poor during these times. This will end up wiping out probably 25%-30% of the digital lenders today. The First loss guarantee clauses will kick in which will render many of them insolvent. As one of our fintech's founder said the other day, lending is not for the fainthearted. Traditional lenders post this are going to be even more reluctant to work with Fintechs and probably focused on solving their internal issues. It’s not all bad news though. If a digital lender can somehow survive this time, there is a large opportunity at the end of the tunnel with a huge demand and significantly lower competition. It’s all about reaching the other side. Stay strong!

Thanks for staying until the end of this long post. If you are a fintech or looking for an exciting role in the fintech ecosystem please reach out to me. We are hiring for roles in Business & Engineering. You can find the details here: https://angel.co/company/apollo-finvest-1/jobs

Due to the unfortunate situation caused by the Corona Virus around the world, Apollo Finvest is moving to work from home starting 16th March. We are doing this keeping in mind the health and safety of our team, their families and the potential unbearable strain it could have on our country's healthcare system if appropriate measures are not taken by us all. We will review the situation every week and decide the next steps accordingly.

This is uncharted territory and we are bound to learn how best to navigate these waters further along the timeline. For now, below is the memo we shared with the team. In case you or your company are already or are thinking of working remotely, feel free to pick up points relevant to you all.

1) Have a steady and fast internet connection

2) Install Asana and Google Chat on your mobile phones and laptops/computers 

3) Add your office emails on your phone. We are a startup and need to move quickly. We need to be available as and when required. Mobile is the fastest way to check and respond to emails on the go

4) Respond on chat within a few minutes. It's important to feel connected and be available when people are trying to connect with you. Being responsive on chat and Asana helps establish that

• Let your colleagues know if you're going to be unavailable for 

- Taking an interview 

- Going on a call/discussion 

- Taking a break 

5) Remote work can make you feel unmotivated. To avoid that

• Allocate a space in your house to yourself where you can work without being distracted or disturbed by other members in the house 

• Get dressed in the right attire for work

• Have a routine. When the workday ends, have a change of clothes and possibly switch your location at home to help yourself wind down 

6) One of the biggest issues which can crop up due to remote work is not knowing what the other person is doing. Over-communication here is better than under communication

• Include your phone number in your email signatures

• Type clearly when communicating through chat/messages/emails. Avoid short forms and double-check for grammar and spelling mistakes.

- This will help people get in touch with you directly on call without scrambling to find your number 

• Use Google hangouts video for speaking to each other and sharing screens so that communication is smooth - Avoid this only when the internet connection is weak and prevents video sharing 

• Use headphones on video calls. Microphones and speakers on most windows laptops are not great.

• Communicate quickly and generously

- Pick up the phone and call people

- Better yet, video call team members on hangouts to feel more connected

- Do this as often as possible and needed. This can be done communicating an update, discussing some points or just a general catchup

• Share progress frequently on the relevant chat groups

- Remotely working means it's always better to overshare information about what you're working on, what is getting completed and where you are stuck

- It’s important everyone feels as connected as possible. Sharing information and progress openly helps 

• Share updates with partners more often 

- Us working remotely can make our partners feel that their work may be impacted and slow them down. We should share updates with them as often as possible through emails and calls to make them feel comfortable about us working remotely and give them confidence that work is continuing with the same momentum 

• Send formal emails to everyone (team members and partners) after speaking to them on calls or Whatsapp 

- It is crucial we avoid any confusion due to lack of communication

- Mark all relevant folks in cc on emails. Again over-communication is better than under communication 

- Unless there is a formal email communicating something, it can lead to confusion in the future

• Use Asana extensively 

- Every time you assign a task or ask someone to do anything, put it on asana

- Assign the task to them and add relevant people as followers for that task 

- If that task is assigned to you, put comments on that task whenever there are any updates on it

- Put these comments as and when there are updates

- This helps information reach all relevant stakeholders as fast as possible so they can take the next step of relevant actions  

- Use Asana as your personal to-do list. Assign tasks to yourself so you do not forget to do something

- Prioritise your tasks on Asana. If something is not clear, speak to your lead and seek their help to get better clarity and a sense of priorities

- This will help you start your day with a clear list of tasks and managing your time efficiently

• Use Google Calendar 

- Use calendar invites for both internal and external meetings 

- Share your calendars with everyone on the team so people can see each other's schedules and plan discussions/meetings accordingly 

7) Managers and Leaders

• Have virtual stand-ups at set times during the day

• Have clear KPI’s/metrics you are monitoring to define success and expectations of your team

• Monitor this at a regular frequency (daily/weekly depending on your metric)

• Spend extra time in making sure your team members are on the same page as you and have a clear sense of what they are working towards and why it's important. You are only as good as the motivation levels of your team

• If you see performance levels dropping, speak to your team member/members and understand how you can help. Remote work can be difficult, it is our responsibility to help people through this and ensure it does not affect the company's performance 

Over the last year building the “AWS for lending” we have partnered with 15+ fintechs across the country. This gave us a unique vantage point in the industry. We had the pleasure to meet many interesting companies and founders to understand a variety of business models in the fintech lending space

So in a world where everybody and their grandma wants to lend, here are the 2 categories of companies which exist in the fintech lending world in India today

Performance marketing ~ DSA Companies

1. How to identify such companies?

• They boast huge AUM’s (500cr-1000cr+ annually) and loan origination numbers (10,000cr+)

• They have traditional Banks/NBFC’s powering loans in the backend

• They put up minimal skin in the game

• They claim sub 2% NPA’s

• The loan tenures will be longer (9 months+) and ticket sizes will be larger

2. These companies essentially act as the top of the funnel for traditional lenders. They filter borrowers and connect them with the appropriate traditional lenders. They are purely performance marketing companies who get paid per loan disbursed. The fee is usually 1%-1.5%. The underwriting and collections are completely managed by the lender

3. It’s a great model for traditional lenders because it’s like having a DSA who puts up some skin in the game, while lending to the exact same customers they have always lent too

4. Customers are happy because the application process has smooth UI/UX compared to traditional lenders

5. Since disbursement experience is yet owned by the traditional lender, it’s not always smooth. In such cases, the customer's anger is directed towards the fintech and its App Store ratings

6. AUM numbers are a vanity metric here and used as a relic from traditional lending businesses. It's like Google claiming they have an e-commerce business and its revenue is equal to the revenue their ads generate for companies like Flipkart, Amazon, etc

7. The lifetime value (LTV) of customers here is low because they can always go directly to traditional lenders to avail the same services

8. The cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is high here because of the high competition to underwrite this customer since he’s already considered creditworthy by traditional lenders

9. No traditional lender is interested in lending basis a startups “proprietary algorithm”. Reasons are simple

• The business generated is way too small for them to care or bother to change

• Their systems have standard products built in and they simply do not have the motivation or technological capability to build in new product categories

• The unit economics of doing new products or small ticket size loans does not make sense due to their overheads. As an experiment, go to your nearest branch and ask them for a Rs 15000 loan for 3 months. No matter what you do, they will not sanction it

Proprietary Lenders ~ IP creating companies

1. How to identify such companies?

• They claim huge no. of loans disbursed in a month. These are companies with fairly small AUM’s

• They will have new age NBFC’s powering loans to their customer in the backend

• They put up significant skin in the game

• They claim sub 5% NPA’s

• The loan tenures will be shorter (6 months and lower) and ticket sizes will be small

2. The reality here is that these fintechs are either

• Creating new age products or

• Catering to customers outside the spectrum of traditional lenders.

3. This means either the product they offer is not available via traditional lenders or the borrowers they are lending to would be rejected by traditional lenders.

4. The IP creation force is strong here. The moat here is the credit algorithm, collections and the ops needed to make this truly new business sustainable

IP creating companies take the path less traveled

5. Significant skin in the game and the higher NPA’s indicate the learning curve involved in creating new categories. It is a risk and reward game here. They are risking doing something unique with the possibility of higher NPA’s but if they crack it, the potential is huge

6. Internally, we fondly refer to these companies as “category creating” companies

7. The correct metrics here are the number of loan cycles which have been seen by the fintech and the number of loans processed per month. The higher these metrics the more feedback their credit algorithm has gotten and thus the more it has improved. If you crack a new category, that algorithm becomes the moat

8. The scale-up here has to be once the credit algorithm has seen enough cycles. Enough cycles imply your model has seen statistically significant data and your NPA’s have stabilized to a point which makes sense as per your business model

9. The lifetime value (LTV) is high and cost of customer acquisition (CAC) is low in this case since this category is not catered to by anyone else

10. The idea of these companies to do small ticket size loans, low duration loans so as to improve their algorithm fairly quickly while being capital efficient

So the next time you come across a fintech, do ask yourself which of the 2 segments do they belong to and why. In a world full of PR and flashy numbers being thrown around, it is an interesting exercise to peel back the onion and see what’s actually cooking. Internally, we love “category creating” companies and do our best work while working with them.

As we complete a little over 1 year, I thought I will share a little about our journey so far.

Personally, it’s been like doing high-speed Ph.D. in finance, specifically lending and guess what? Nothing forces you to learn faster than going all in with your own capital. Sink or swim..go big or go home. Stakes are high and you have to learn to fly.

For the uninitiated, we are a white-labeled lender. We are a plug and play digital lending platform “enabling” fintech/internet companies to lend. We bring in the lending license, capital, scoring, regulation, and compliance via an API accessible platform. Think of us as the Goldman Sachs behind the Apple Credit Card or the Cross River Bank behind Affirm, Coinbase, Stripe etc

You can think of us as a branchless lender powering Fintech’s. Few people understand what we are building, partly because this is no Uber for X. No worries though since the most important people in the room get what we are building instantly and love it. That's our customers. Why? Because we enable:

• 100% instant loans

• 100% compliant loans

• 100% approval rates on loans

• 100% digital loans

• All leading to 100% satisfied borrowers :)

Over the past year, we partnered with 15+ fintech/internet companies to work on unorthodox customer segments & lending products together. They have built a wide spectrum of products on our platform like personal loans, point of sale loans, pay later loans, credit cards, MSME loans, non-convertible debentures etc.

Its a been a privilege to work with amazing founders & their teams on such a wide gamut of problems. It’s like being a tiny part of all their journeys. Nothing is more inspiring than seeing companies do their first few loans with us, iterate rapidly and go from strength to strength to being well on the path of becoming rock-solid companies.

Our mantra is to do everything possible to make our partners successful. Their success = Our success = Growth! Nothing is off the table. Right from hiring, brainstorming on problems together or connecting them with like-minded founders..we are happy to do what it takes.

Today we process 1.2 million+ loans per month (For context PayU processes 1.6 million/month) and are enrolling 2–3+ fintechs every month. As we look to the coming year, our goal is to build ‘AWS for lending’. Our ambition is to work with 3X the number of partners and build the next generation of tools to serve as the operating system for financial services of the future.

Our vision is to democratize financial services starting with lending. We think the financial services of the future will be highly customized and tailored to the needs of the customer. We strongly believe that the person/company closest to the borrower has the most amount of information about them and is the best placed to judge their creditworthiness. This is a throwback to the old days of banking when opening a bank account required someone with already an account in that bank to vouch for you. With the right incentives, we feel this ecosystem can unlock exponential efficiencies. Imagine an entrepreneur in a remote village of Bihar can partner with us and begin lending to his fellow villagers using his local know-how and our platform. Sounds wild? We are already working on this right now.

That's it for this year's update!

Bottom line: The next time a traditional lender doesn’t want to work with you, doesn’t treat you special or slows you down, reach out to us. We are your friendly neighborhood lending platform & we love fintechs!

Sounds interesting? Come join us. Let’s take this to the next level together! We look for people who are self-driven, think outside the box, future/past entrepreneurs and overall nice human beings. Because, hey..if we are going to spend 10 hours+ every day with each other, we might as well enjoy each others company!

Some roles we are hiring for:

1. Data scientists

2. Full stack engineers

3. Risk Analysts

4. None of the above but feel you can contribute? Write in and we’ll create a new role for you!