CredAll : The Prologue

CredAll is a call to democratise credit.

In our quest to democratise access to formal credit, ‘India Stack’ lowered lending related operational costs drastically and through its consent layer (Account Aggregator), liberated data to empower Rajni

However, for the flow of affordable credit capital to the creditworthy borrowers, whether merchants or individuals, there are challenges.

For lenders,

  • For low ticket size, short tenure loans, lenders find the cost of borrower acquisition prohibitive
  • Custom third party tie-ups with loan originators is painful
  • Getting rich data signals of merchant’s business activity (to assess creditworthiness) is not easy

So, we went to marketplaces / aggregators, who have high interface with prospective borrowers and we learnt that :

For marketplaces,

  • Providing affordable credit to their customers with custom integrations (or manual processes) with multiple lenders, is a Herculean task
  • Turn around Time to get loan deposited to merchants is subsequently high (in days, in some cases)
  • Ability to provide custom financial products quickly is restricted, owing to implementation challenges

We needed to bring together the whole ecosystem, to collectively serve the market. So, we built the common language aka the 'Open Protocol' for all lenders to utilise and create innovative, financial credit products for the market, at scale.

Just as UPI is the 'Open APIs for Payments', Account Aggregators (AAs) use 'Open APIs for Data', we created new 'Open APIs for Credit - OCEN'. OCEN stands for Open Credit Enablement Network.

  • The marketplaces/aggregators using these OCEN APIs to embed credit offerings in their applications are called ‘Loan Service Providers’(LSPs)
  • The LSP is an ‘agent of the borrower’. They educate their customers about various credit offerings and help them avail credit at affordable rates. Owing to their tacit know-how of their customers, they are well poised to craft custom credit products for their customers in collaboration with lenders.
  • We are now bringing these LSPs together with lenders, technology service providers and more while evangelising adoption of new credit APIs

With the whole ecosystem's collective effort, we are sure we will be able to democratise access to credit. It's something that's much needed now.