MobiKwik In Talks With Partners To Offer Loans

Mobile wallet major MobiKwik plans to disrupt the financial services space with the launch of a lending product (instant credit product) out of its app later this month, a top official said.

The instant credit product — which will mark MobiKwik’s entry into lending — will target ‘new to credit’ (NTC) customers — both individual and small businesses, according to Co-founder Upasana Taku.

MobiKwik, the second largest mobile wallet company in the country, will look to give small ticket loan as well as larger-sized loans out of its App.

A ‘new to credit’ customer is one who does not have any credit score and generally ignored by most banks for sanctioning credit.

“We are looking to launch an instant credit disbursal product for NTC users and not instant sanction product. This will probably be the first instant credit disbursal product in India,” Taku told BusinessLine.

It will be end-to-end delivered as a MobiKwik product including the entire communication, experience and money disbursal, but run on somebody else’s balancesheet.

On the anvil are 2-3 lending products and MobiKwik is in talks with 2-3 players, including partner Bajaj. “We are taking a deep data driven approach with lot of machine learning,” Taku said.

For credit assessment of the borrowers, MobiKwik has developed its own alternate lending model —Mobiscore — based on say 400 variables.

“We have been spending the last nine months in understanding our merchants and customers in depth. If we understand them better, we will be able to deliver more financial services. There is huge opportunity for technology disruption in distribution of financial services products,” she said.

MobiKwik also plans to roll out investment products like mutual funds, Taku said.

Partnership strategy

Asked if MobiKwik plans to look for more partnerships to expand its user base, she said the company is looking to strike more partnerships with large corporations, including public sector banks. It may be recalled that MobiKwik has strategic partnerships with large players like Bajaj Finance, IndusInd Bank and BSNL.

Full KYC

She also said the mobile wallet company is focussing on getting customers to comply with the bank-like KYC norms mandated by the Reserve Bank of India for wallet companies.

“We see this RBI requirement of ‘full KYC’ as more of an opportunity. The story in the payments industry is going to be one of how many full KYC norms you have and no longer about how many millions of customers are on your platform,” she said.

Asked whether the recent breather given by the Supreme Court in respect of furnishing of Aadhaar applied to wallet companies, Taku replied in the negative. “The Supreme Court guidelines have not given any breather to us. The breather (from Aadhaar) is only for banks and telecom. We are still guided by the requirement of RBI,” she said.

RBI had advised wallet companies like MobiKwik to stop servicing non-KYC customers from this month.