Axis Bank is partnering with Suvidhaa, a domestic remittances company, to offer funds to the lowest strata of the society, like rickshaw pullers, taxi drivers, tailors and barbers, who could not hitherto avail of banking services for want of collateral security. Rajiv Anand, head of Retail Banking at the bank, said Suvidhaa has been the bank’s business correspondent for a long time based on the transaction details of the customers of Suvidhaa, the bank has run an in-house algorithm to select people and pre-approve a loan amount for them. They can walk into any of the 20,000 Suvidhaa outlets and pitch for this loan product, he added. Suvidhaa has processed the transaction history of its 35 million customer base that has been doing remittances through its retail touch points for years. Axis Bank has run its own algorithms on this data, tracking the person’s payments record across 85 points such as bill payments, remittances, and mobile recharges to approve a term loan of Rs 7500, Rs 12,000 or Rs 15,000 to be repaid over a cycle of 18 months. Parish Raged, MD, Suvidhaa Infoserve, said Suvidhaa has been running a pilot project in Mumbai for 3 months now and loans have been given out to 200 people. There have already been two cycles of repayment and have not got any case of defaults yet, he added.
