In a candid interview with NewsX in its special series NewsX India A-List, Rishabh Goel & Anand Agrawal, Founders, Credgenics shared some 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 actually hampering the growth of the Indian economy. It is almost everywhere that how our problem in terms of lending is not getting addressed because of the rising NPAs and that is a common problem statement across the developing economies. So it’s not specific to India but any developing economies, be it Southeast Asia or Middle-East. So here a lot of focus was done 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 digitize the entire collections’ piece and if you see, lending is essentially a collections’ business. It’s very easy to give money but it’s actually difficult to take it back. So, we started focusing on that part of the puzzle.”
Joining in the conversation, Anand said, “When we kind of started on the collections side, most of these fin-tech companies were a part of the lending processes. We wanted to kind of see, understand the entire process of collection. We saw it was manually-driven, there were no tech-driven approaches towards collection. While everything is getting digitalized, most of these collection processes still were still done in traditional ways. So that is where we kind of brought the technological solutions.”
To give a clearer view on how Credgenics actually 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 there were different teams of Collections who 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 the trust factor with its clients. “Covid helped us a lot here as it accelerated the digital journey. So 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. Hence, it was not even the outbound sales, it was mostly the inbound sales we were doing, the basics on why people were reaching out to us, enabling them to adopt a tech infrastructure to handle those collections. So digitization adoption became very clear after covid and it was primarily that people had accepted that.”
