Lvln Murty, MD & CEO at Dvara KGFS, shares the details about the top markets, popular products, expansion, and transformation initiatives taken by the company:
Ravi Lalwani: What are the most popular financial products in the company’s portfolio? What new products are you planning to add?
Lvln Murty: We are focused on serving and meeting the financial needs/well-being of rural and deep rural customers across the country. The company’s flagship products are Joint Liability Group Loans (JLG) and Micro Enterprise Loans (MEL).
Apart from this, we also offer jewel loans, home improvement loans, cattle purchase and maintenance loans, and consumer loans. We also offer wealth management products to our customers through our partners in the form of gold SIP savings, hospicash, and personal accident insurance.
We are in the process of adding doorstep jewel loans, secured micro-enterprise loans, buy now pay later loans, health insurance, motor insurance, and other such products to our portfolio.
What is the geographical spread of the company? Which are the top 5 states for business? What new states will the company expand to during the next 12 months?
The company currently operates in 6 states namely TN, Karnataka, Odisha, Chhattishgarh, Jharkhand, and Uttarakhand. The top 3 main business contributors in decreasing order are TN, Odisha, and Karnataka.
The company operates in 52 districts and approximately 12,000 villages in these 6 states and will continue to deepen its penetration within these 6 states over the next 12 months.
Give an overview of the human resources of the company in terms of numbers, skills, education, diversity, age group, role, etc.
We have a total of 2168 employees whose education is from 12th to PG. Among them, there are 1652 male employees and 516 female employees in the age group 20 to 58 years in the department of field, support, leadership, and management.
Give an overview of the software applications running in the company?
Dvara KGFS is a digital-first company and most of our processes and services are offered to our rural customers digitally. As part of our suite, we use several applications to help deliver our products and services to our customers.
KGFS Assist: Assisted app used by the field force as a Loan Origination System (LOS) to enroll, onboard customers, upload their documents, underwrite, sanction, and finally disburse the loans to the customers. Customer service and collections are also handled on the same app.
KGFS Mitra: Assisted app used by our digital agent network to provide multiple products and services to customers such as AEPS withdrawals, DMT, mobile recharges, bill payments, EMI collections, and applications for new products, etc.
CRM: It is used by inside sales to handle outbound calls for overdue collections, lead generation, and QRC management on inbound calls.
Apart from the above, we are building our WhatsApp chatbot to help customers directly interact and transact with us. Besides driving the organization towards customer centricity, KGFS 2.0 Tech & Data Science Platform aims at improving operational efficiency, effectiveness, and market growth.
What have initiatives been taken by your organization to improve topline, Bottomline, and productivity?
Improve topline: The platform enables the agent network to operate along with the branch team. The agents take care of the transactional activities at the last mile while the branch team manages customer relationships and credit functions.
The platform also creates new avenues for customer sourcing Inbound marketing via WhatsApp, customer self-service app, data mining on customer transactions, data mining on CB reports (including earlier rejects), and retention management tools.
WhatsApp engagement with customers, customer self-service app along with agent network provides the necessary impetus for customer stickiness and indirect network effects.
Improve bottom line: Improve the quality of customers using data science initiatives such as credit scoring (KGFS Score), psychometric assessment, cashflow assessment, fraud pattern detection from CB report, etc.
Improve productivity: Inter-department collaboration tools such as Vendor App, Rent App, Operation Helpdesk, and IT Helpdesk with integrated task management & Automation across various functions.
What have initiatives been taken by your organization to improve customer value?
We have enabled our customers to be digital-ready using AEPS, UPI, and eSign capabilities. The transactions could be facilitated via digital access points, WhatsApp chatbot, and self-service app for improving customer convenience.
To improve customer lifetime value, we measure the financial well-being of customers and recommend suitable products from our Plan Grow Protect Diversify (PGPD) framework using AI / ML. The platform enables Dvara KGFS to become a full-stack rural finance provider by facilitating a wide variety of third-party products and services.
We use geo-tagging, mobile verification & strong portfolio monitoring tools with automated alerts to help reduce credit & operational risk.
Briefly describe refinements in the credit underwriting process during the last 12 months.
We have introduced a risk grading for our customer’s basis customer profile, financials, credit repayment behavior, and other attributes. Customers are graded into platinum, gold, or silver risk grade which determines the rate of interest and financial eligibility of the customers for various loans.
We have introduced video-based personal discussion as a model for credit appraisal and discussions with customers as part of the underwriting process. We have worked on automation of credit rules which helps in templated credit decisioning to ensure consistency and standardization of our credit underwriting process.
We have also empowered our branch managers to be able to underwrite loans of lower value/ticket sizes.
What are the key expansion and transformation projects in the pipeline during the next 12 months?
We, at Dvara KGFS, are currently working on a few key transformational projects to enhance the omnichannel model (digital agent model, branch on wheels model, inside sales call center model, and WhatsApp chatbot self-service model) to support and complement the branch model with the following key objectives like increase customer connect, deepen our penetration into the villages.
We serve, increase our customer touchpoints, drive digital adoption among our customers, help improve the productivity of our field force and reduce operating costs while enhancing the customer delivery experience.
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