In a candid interview with NewsX in its special series NewsX India A-List, Rishabh Goel and Anand Agrawal, Founders, Credgenics shared insights from their professional journeys. Rishabh and Anand are heading India’s fastest-growing debt resolution platform by converting bad debt into good assets.
Navigating back to why they started Credgenics, Rishabh expressed, “You must be reading about a lot of these problems and newspapers filled with the non-performing asset (NPA) problem which is hampering the growth of the Indian economy. It is almost everywhere that how our problem in terms of lending is not getting addressed due to the rising NPAs and that is a common problem statement across the developing economies. So it’s not specific to India but all developing economies, be it Southeast Asia or the Middle East. Here a lot of focus was on the lending side of the business like it’s primarily a lot of tech intervention, data-driven strategies coming into the lending ecosystem, whereas collections’ was specifically untouched. It was primarily like no one was focusing on how to digitise the entire collections’ piece and lending is essentially a collections’ business. It’s easy to give money but difficult to take it back. So, we started focusing on that part of the puzzle.”
Joining in the conversation, Anand said, “When we started on the collections side most of these fin-tech companies were a part of the lending processes. We wanted to understand the entire process of collection. We saw it was manually-driven, there were no tech-driven approaches towards the collection. While everything is getting digitalised most of these collection processes were still done in traditional ways. That is where we brought technological solutions.”
To give a clearer view on how Credgenics work, Anand added, “We have a SaaS platform for enabling any lender to collect money on their phone. So we have different modules on the platform, like for example, we have a calling module, we have a communications’ module, we have a legal module altogether for the legal team to handle. So earlier maybe different teams of Collections would not be interacting with each other but now, given that there’s one single platform, the data resides on it and different teams would be able to interact in terms of Collections. So legal team performing some sort of actions would be known to the calling team and the calling team is talking to the borrower, it’s position will be visible to the legal team as well for their actions.”
Rishabh shared how Credgenics maintains a trust factor with its clients. “Covid-19 pandemic helped us a lot as it accelerated the digital journey. In the initial days, all the banks and NBFCs moved all the salespeople to collections. That was just a way around to scale collections manually for the time being. But essentially the need for a tech infrastructure to handle those volume collections became quite evident. It was not even the outbound sales, we were mostly doing the inbound sale. People were reaching out to us as we were enabling them to adopt a tech infrastructure to handle those collections. Digital adoption became clear after the pandemic and primarily why people had accepted that.”