Raghava
KreditBee is an Instant Personal Loan platform for self-employed and salaried professionals, where they can apply for a Personal Loan starting from ₹ 1,000 up to ₹ 2 Lakhs as per their requirement. It is a full-stack Digital Lending Platform, with the entire life cycle of the loan, starting from origination to application to disbursement and repayment being completely online.
What is your inspiration to start your startup?
We have always been fascinated by the way personal finance and lending works in India. Financial Inclusion is the key to any economy to flourish. For the Indian economy to thrive to its true potential, every Indian should have stress-free access to accountable credit at their disposal. And KreditBee aims to see this through.
How KreditBee is different from other companies who are in this business?
Our USP is our business model. It is based on standard digital lending, wherein the interest income from the customers serves as a lucrative metric in the Unit Economics sheet. As mentioned earlier, we are an Instant Personal Loan platform for self-employed and salaried professionals, where they can apply for a Personal Loan starting from INR 1,000 up to INR 2 Lakhs as per their requirement. The fact that our all-inclusive life cycle of the loan – from origination to application to disbursement and repayment – is completely online makes us quite unique.
We also work with various partners like Flipkart, Amazon, MakeMyTrip and Myntra, among others. The affiliate income from which becomes another source of income, some of which is passed on to our end customers.
Can you explain in detail about your startup and services?
Our product is a full-stack digital lending platform. It helps people get loans from their smartphones directly into their bank account at any given points of time with no paperwork or branch visits. The whole procedure is completely online – be it eligibility check, application, disbursement, and repayment. We look at alternate lending data points apart from salary and bureau score, and thus we are able to disburse to young professionals who are new to credit, and to those who are non-salaried like the gig workers including part-timers, freelancers and self-employed.
Our interest rate usually starts at 18 per cent, though for certain e-voucher loan products, we disburse at zero cost EMIs as well. With these offerings, we aim to become the first choice when it comes to quick and convenient personal loans. Along with the convenience of applying for a loan, we ensure that our clients build a sturdy credit history in this period and become eligible to take bigger loans from the banks.
Tell us about the founders and the team?
I have known most of my co-founders and core team members from my previous organisation. We share a very good rapport of trust within and outside work. Having mutual respect with the people with whom you work is paramount, especially in a startup. There is a lot of emotional involvement that goes into creating a business from the ground up. Along with the industry skills, it’s undoubtedly essential for the team to have a good affinity to overcome challenging roadblocks and challenging times.
I, am Madhusudan Ekambaram, the Co-Founder & CEO.
I come with 16+ years of experience in Product Portfolio Management. I am also the winner of the coveted Rashtrapati Puraskar (President’s Award) & Rajya Puraskar (Governor’s Award).
Karthikeyan Krishnaswamy, Co-Founder & CTO
- Bachelors of Computing (Honors) in Computer Science from National University of Singapore
- Masters of Computing in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore.
- 12+ years of experience in Technology & Products
Vivek Veda, Co-Founder & CFO
- CA from ICAI
- 14+ years of experience in Investment & Retail Banking
- Director of KrazyBee Services Private Limited, a Systemically Important NBFC with a Loan Book of over INR 1000 Crore
The other core team members are:
Ajeet Kumar, COO
- BTech in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
- PGDM (MBA) from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
- 15+ years of experience primarily focused on consulting & building businesses
Sidharth Vishwanathan, Founding Team Member & CRO
- BE in Information Technology from NITK Surathkal
- PGSEM (MBA) from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
- 12+ years of experience in Data Analytics, Management Consulting & Business Development
Ishan Bose, Founding Team Member & CMO
- BE in Computer Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering (currently Delhi Technological University)
- PDGM (MBA) from Indian Institute of Management, Indore
- Awarded Young Marketer of the Year 2018 by World Marketing Congress, powered by CMO Asia
- TEDx Speaker
Rachit Agarwal, Founding Team Member & CPO
- BTech in Computer Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology
- 5+ years of experience in App Development & Product before starting up
What is your business model?
KreditBee’s business model is based on standard digital lending, wherein the interest income from the consumers serves as a profitability metric in the Unit Economics sheet. We also work with numerous partners like Flipkart, Amazon, MakeMyTrip and Myntra, among others, the partner income from which becomes an additional source of income, some of which we give away to our end customers.
We aim at acquiring a good number of NTC (New to Credit) or self-employed customers and then migrate them to our higher loans product.
How did your journey start towards your startup from planning to funding?
We started with a student lending platform in 2016. To appeal to the students, we needed a name quirky enough and not too financially-intensive. After a bit of reflection, we decided to go with Bee and thought of adding the adjective as Crazy. We conducted a survey with the college students which made us realize that this name was a clear winner. Since the domain name – crazybee was super expensive, we thought of booking the version with k in it. Hence, it became KrazyBee.
After two years of launching KrazyBee, we planned to launch our next lending platform for young professionals in 2018. Since we were already the market leaders in lending among college students, we wanted to carry forward the baton in the young professional space. We wanted to go for a name that was similar to our previous brand. To keep it germane to the intention, we thought of going ahead with KreditBee (Credit with a K + Bee).
Is your startup growing at good phase according to your plans? What are the upcoming plans from your end?
Currently, KreditBee has a user base of 30 Million App installs, 20 Million registered customers, 5 Million unique loan customers, and 2 Million active unique loan customers with NPA of ~3% of the overall disbursed principal. In addition to this, we are partners with notable companies like IIFL, Incred, AU Small Finance Bank, and Vivriti Capital.
As an entity, we have already reached breakeven, and are always conservative in our cost and strategic initiatives. We re-invest most of our earnings in product innovation within the entity since the notion is to disrupt the financial space in as many ways as possible. As a result, we have attained breakeven within two years of our operations and have been profitable for the last two years.
Going ahead, we plan to detect a few more ground-breaking lending products and have a more wide-ranging set of products in our digital lending portfolio.
What is your stack on the competition? Who are your competitors? How you are overcoming them?
Any organisation that disburses loans digitally can be considered competition for us. Many such apps have been launched in the market in the last 6-12 months.
As we all know, the present situation is very hard to survive any startup how you are overcoming and what are your future plans after Covid-19?
Hit by the COVID-19 slump, businesses are undergoing major overhauls no matter how established they are. The impact on startups has been way more brutal owing to scanter cash reserves. The biggest challenge right now is to reassess the credit scoring mechanism of customers with respect to the new normal. It also means recognising the mindset of the consumers considering the changing dynamics. The demand for loans is now being propelled by the needs rather than the wants.
In the next few months, we will try to articulate strategies depending on the current situation. I believe, post-COVID there will have more customers to assist and also adequate liquidity to meet the demand.
Types of loans from KreditBee
We have a very balanced portfolio in terms of our monthly disbursement. The Flexi-Personal Loan is a short-term personal loan product with tenure ranging from 2 months to 6 months and ticket size ranging from Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 30,000. This is the most popular loan product in our overall portfolio. We also have significant disbursements for Personal Loans for Salaried professionals. The tenure ranges from 3 months to 15 months and the ticket size ranges from Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 2, 00,000. Then, we also have e-Voucher Loan, a loan product with disbursement in the form of e-Vouchers across various partner platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, and MakeMyTrip, among others.
Did you get any recognition or awards for your startup?
For our innovative thinking, Kreditbee has been identified as Top 100 Emerging Market Inclusive Fintech Lending Startups in 2017 by the World Economic Forum.
What do you suggest people who are interested in starting their own business?
We are at a very embryonic stage when it comes to the digital lending scene in India. Given the population of our country and the increasingly tech-savvy generation, there are copious opportunities for anybody to venture in. All it would need is a little imagination and the will to be the best from the rest.
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