CoinTribe- India’s first truly Online Lending platform for SMEs that enables Online Risk assessment

By Subhiksha Ganesan

Posted on December 21, 2016

CoinTribe is the only lending platform which has back-tested its credit model with large banks and whose platform is being used by banks for credit risk assessment. Additionally, within a significantly short period of time, CoinTribe has been able to carve its unique identity with multiple first-of-its-kind innovations. It exercises a highly simplified process with comprehensive technological amalgamation.

An Easy process involving minimal work

CoinTribe facilitates quick and easy collateral-free loans to SMEs and salaried people through an entirely digital loan application and assessment process. It requires minimal paperwork and documentation such as bank statement, online access to Aadhaar etc. with zero application cost. CoinTribe operates on two models – Marketplace model and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model.  While the marketplace model enables loan origination and credit assessment on the platform, the PaaS model enables Banks and NBFCs to leverage CoinTribe’s cutting-edge technological services to digitally underwrite customers sourced by their own branches, sales teams and other channels.

Face the challenge to see the victory

The biggest challenge  faced was in convincing the initial set of banks on viability of Online Risk Assessment of SMEs. It was very difficult to visualize the viability of a purely Online Underwriting model to replicate the same. It took seven months of persistent efforts, meetings with over 150 people across multiple functions to convince the first large Bank to sign up for a material Proof of Concept (POC) exercise. After POC with three banks that ran for over 5 months across 5 locations with 800+ applications, they could align with those Banks that Online Underwriting with multiple validations and deep risk analytics using 500+ variables was a far efficient alternative to physical underwriting processes with higher degree of consistency and ongoing refinement. The next big challenge they are working on is that of tech integration with banks to provide a seamless experience to the borrowers on their platform. Having a flexible tech stack helps to integrate with multiple set of systems across banks and quite often within each bank.

The Idea Story of CoinTribe

The idea was conceived by founders in discussion with the anchor investor and mentor, Puneet Dalmia, after extensive research of global markets where the problem of small business financing has been addressed by online lending. The founders spent time with Online lending platforms in China and US to understand how they have thought about the problem in their markets, mistakes they have made. This led to the design of the business model apt for Indian market. The most exciting moment at the idea conceptualization stage was the realization that enough ingredients existed in the Indian digital ecosystem to enable robust Online Risk Assessment and decision making in real time.

And it worked

Amit Sachdev, Rohit Lohia, and Manish Chaudhari are the co-founders of CoinTribe. Amit and Rohit had worked together and  both jumped at the idea of building a world class organization to solve this immense problem of SME financing. It took us almost 5 months of intensive effort and over 18 meetings to find Manish, who had this perfect blend of deep Credit Risk experience and ability to think first principle on how to solve many of the issues involved in Underwriting of small businesses. Later they hired a core technology team for the development effort required. With a small 15 member team it was fairly easy to align on Company’s Vision, end state solution to the problem and start executing in that direction. The fact that was closely watched out for cultural alignment and passion for the problem to get solve helped a lot.

On a plan to expand operations with Funding

CoinTribe went live on March 2016 and since then about INR 100 Cr of disbursement has been done. Revenues are likely to be between 3-5 Crores. They have been seed funded with $3 million by Dalmia Bharat Group and are further looking towards raising $10-15 million to scale up technology stack, expand operations to cities outside Delhi and simultaneously associate with financial institutions.

Get the loan sanctioned in just few steps

A borrower could apply for a loan online by providing the following information

• Registration
• Personal and Business/Employment Information
• KYC documents Upload
• Bank statement Upload or Online connect

Subsequently, CoinTribe uses these details to grab the information from several digital sources and churns to generate a risk profile of the borrower over 500 variables, insights, indices, risk rating and loan eligibility recommendation. The information is then passed on to a suitable set of lenders, who then revert with their decision Online. This decision along with loan offer pricing is communicated to the borrower and if he accepts the offer, he could e-sign the loan agreement.

A Ladder to the Moon

CoinTribe team aims to rapidly increase their effectiveness in reaching to benefit maximum customers and facilitate USD 5 billion worth of loans through CoinTribe by 5^th year. Read more about Indian Startups.

CoinTribe- India’s first truly Online Lending platform for SMEs that enables Online Risk assessment