Abhishek A.’s Post

It's a proud moment for all of us at CreditVidya- excited to announce the acquisition of CreditVidya (“CV”) by CRED. Cred is a market leader in its category and a fully digital platform with a mission to celebrate and reward credit-worthy individuals.  Joining forces with CRED will empower us to further invest in R&D capabilities, strengthen distribution and to rapidly scale PrefR, our embedded lending platform, - benefiting CV’s partners, consumers and lending community.  CRED and CV will operate independently with CV doubling down on its mission of making India an inclusive credit ecosystem.  I want to take a moment to look back on our journey as we get ready to move into an exciting future.  Our story started with a 100 sq ft office behind a commercial market in Bombay. We have evolved from a financial literacy platform to an AI-powered alternative data underwriting engine and found the product market fit in PrefR. Today we are a 250+ member team and have grown 100x over the last two years. Big salute to all my CV family for strong conviction in our mission and creating a great product. None of this would have been possible without our constant hustle to get things done, clear and honest communication, and working as one to overcome adversity. Thankful to our investors who have backed us through this journey. Finally big thanks to Kunal Shah, Miten Sampat and the CRED team for believing in CreditVidya. Onwards and upwards  Rajesh Raju Vikram Vaidyanathan Rajat Agarwal Sanjay Jain shyam menon Navroz D. Udwadia Kunal Shah Miten Sampat Sahil Bhagtani Sagar Godbole Vinayak N Rajiv Raj Arun Amarnath Pochadri Ariga Read more: https://lnkd.in/gXh67urc

Continuing with my series of lessons learned as an entrepreneur: Lesson 2#: Ruthless prioritization will keep you sane, your employees happy and maintain momentum. Dopamine hit is crazy when you keep checking things off your “To-Do” lists. The downside is that we don’t spend enough time identifying and solving problem statements that can unlock the largest opportunity. Note: This is different than solving for the most complex problem statement, often a honeytrap for techies. As entrepreneurs and as leaders we have only finite resources at our disposal and hence the incremental effort must deliver maximum value. Ruthless prioritization is what differentiates the high-performance team. Illustration: Through the door population characteristics from a digitally sourced channel resembles characteristics of India’s income pyramid. Hence by design digital platforms will acquire 90% of its population from low-income profiles (80-20 self-employed/salaried split). Given very few lenders even offer un-secured product to this segment, bureau scores were never trained on this population and hence bureau scores for this segment do not differentiate risk. We call this population underserved. We ruthlessly prioritized every single task that would help us build underwriting stack for these underserved segment (USD $500bn opportunity). Result? 5 years and assessing 60mn+ profiles in partnership with 55+ institutions later, I am happy to share the performance of CV-Score vis-à-vis bureau score. For a digitally sourced customer, the lenders now can reduce their delinquencies by 50% while keeping the same approval rates. Read that again!  CreditVidya #creditscoring #bigdata

We live in a world where going to gym / yoga studio is a crime but buying alcohol isn't. Healthcare is rigged. There will be many more viruses and are we supposed to just lock everyone up time and again?

I’m thrilled to announce that Prefr (CreditVidya) and Retailio have partnered to launch working capital limits for 100,000+ Retailio pharma retailers across India. Retailio is India’s Pharmaceutical B2B marketplace with a presence in 125+ cities that empowers retailers to place orders seamlessly and settle their invoice payments digitally. Retailers can now purchase inventory using the credit line offered by Prefr platform. The real challenge to offer a low ticket / low tenure loan are operating costs. We have been able to solve this through credit model built on proprietary data, tech stack that processes application with zero manual intervention and automated collection systems. ProductNation/iSPIRT 95% of 65m+ businesses contribute to over 30% of India’s GDP. This will be our first step to formalize their credit demand of over $500b. With that, I am extremely grateful to Rupesh Pathak, Suyash Motarwar and the entire Retailio team. Also extremely grateful CreditVidya family for making it happen! #credit #finance #fintech #msme #retail #paylater #pharmacy

I have been reflecting upon the lessons learned as an entrepreneur. Over the course of coming weeks, I want to share some of my key learnings - Lesson#1: It always takes more time and money (resources) to launch / scale a product. This is the exact reason why it is generally advised to raise more money than what we think we will need. We need to be aware of our overconfidence bias. Illustration: February’ 2021 was the best month for our Financial Services arm. We disbursed loans ranging from INR 10k to INR 1.5 lacs to self-employed in partnership with Xiaomi India, Truecaller and Google Pay. We clocked 4x growth over January, but we are one year late to the party. I can blame this to economic slowdown because of COVID but the point is that we are still one year late to the party. There are other countless such examples. To ensure I stick to the deadlines, I now budget for both external and internal exigencies while planning. As a CEO, I have shifted my focus from execution to building a strong governance structure that ensures transparent communication and highlights bottlenecks. For most governance structure and weekly meetings might seem waste of time but I cannot stress the importance of it! CreditVidya

I’m delighted to announce that Prefr and Truecaller have partnered to launch term loans for small businesses in India. One of the most popular apps in India, it recently added a whopping 400,000 new users in a single day. This huge customer base of nearly 200 million (currently), will now have access to affordable formal credit through a smooth customer journey. A shout out to Truecaller's engineering team who ensured that our APIs were integrated within the platform in three weeks flat, and to Sony Joy and the fintech team for making this wonderful partnership happen! At CreditVidya we believe embedded finance is the future of finance. By integrating our simple APIs, now anyone can distribute financial services on their platform. Do reach out to enquire more. Check out www.prefr.com for more information. #credit #finance #fintech #msme #retail #embeddedfinance

Deepak Singh Gujrar runs a kirana store on the outskirts of Bikaner. Blessed with two daughters, he has been running this shop for the last 4 years. Most of his business still runs on cash and he uses a local PSU bank for all his banking needs. Digital payments account for less than 5% of the total transactions. A flourishing business was jolted by pandemic and he reached out to the bank for a working capital loan only to be denied! His TransUnion CIBIL Limited had only a TW loan. He had no collateral to show and the overtly complicated process led to the rejection of his loan application. Two days ago CreditVidya processed his loan application successfully and disbursed loan to Deepak's bank account in less than 24 hours. This is how CreditVidya kicked off 2021. This is just not Deepak's story. 65mn + MSMEs in India are the growth engine of Indian economy contributing to 30% of our GDP and yet they lack access to formal credit. At CreditVidya we are excited to solve the problem of affordable credit to MSMEs through cash-flow underwriting. Hope we all make giant strides in 2021 and this year brings joy to all the micro entrepreneurs who are the foundation of our economy. Reserve Bank of India (RBI), SIDBI(Small Industries Development Bank of India)

Unpopular opinion - Too much of venture funding is detrimental to a lending startup.

I’m absolutely thrilled to announce the launch of CreditVidya’s embedded financial services platform for MSMEs, Prefr, in partnership with Google Pay and Xiaomi India. Now any digital platform can provide a wider, more relevant suite of financial services to its merchants by embedding Prefr via easy to integrate APIs. To begin with, we are offering ‘pay later’ loans that simplify supply chain finance, cash advance loans to extend working capital and term loans for the self-employed. In the coming months, we will add expense management, financial fitness reports, credit cards for merchants and other products. Prefr will be powered by CreditVidya’s patented AI-powered cash flow underwriting platform that underwrites even first-time loan applicants accurately and efficiently. Check out www.prefr.com for more information. We’d love to discuss how we can work together. You can DM me on LinkedIN, leave or comment or schedule a demo via the Prefr website Absolutely grateful to my CreditVidya team and partners who have worked day and night to make this dream come true. Pulkit Trivedi Vishal Shroff Girish M. Vikram Singh Ajay Vikram Singh Anoop Slathia Anmol Singhal Ajay Sahasrabuddhe Sarnaz Abubaker Yue Suo #credit #finance #fintech #fmcg #retail