D Venkatesh, Founder at Lentra, and Rajesh Krishnia, Country Head-BFSI at Nutanix, share a clear picture on how ‘lending’ has evolved over the last couple of years.
Babu Nair: Credit off-take has been hit during the pandemic. What role is technology playing?
D Venkatesh, Founder – Lentra
D Venkatesh: Operational areas requiring a higher degree of touch have been digitized successfully. For example, the manually intensive KYC process is now being executed via digital media combined with API based verification. Lentra’s eKYC -, video-based KYC – and Personal Discussion (videoPD) solutions have turned out to be game changers ever since the pandemic struck.
Digital data sources are increasingly being used to augment applicant data for better and quicker decisions. Operational automation has greatly enhanced application processing throughput. Lentra’s customers use eligibility grids, deviation matrices, evaluation rules, scorecards and data integrations extensively to reach rapid decisions on loans seamlessly and easily.
Better qualified applications lead to reduced rejections, reduced credit risk, increased productivity and reduced customer acquisition cost. Lentra’sGoNoGo platform suite enables banks in achieving very high algorithmic decisioning capability reducing human underwriting to 20% or less.
Rajesh Krishnia, Country Head-BFSI – Nutanix
Rajesh Krishnia: Banks and NBFCs are a customer-driven business today and want 100% focus from all teams, on customer needs and experience, while they expect partners such as Nutanix, to provide the platform on which they can build and offer these solutions. From DevOps Automation to Unified Data Layers to Security, Nutanix offers customers the right set of tools to enable digital initiatives. Additionally, End-user Computing solutions from Nutanix, ensure that Banks are able to deliver on CX and innovation as well as maintain BAU operations, even if their employees have to ‘work-from-home’ as is necessitated by covid.
How can banks compete with fintechs on agility?
D Venkatesh: Banks need to take a holistic view of the changing landscape and embrace technology as well as business process changes. Banks also have to take a collaborative approach and work with the larger ecosystem for greater leverage. Lentra’s integrations and open API framework allows lenders to collaborate easily and quickly with the emerging ecosystem.
Rajesh Krishnia: Fintechs have no challenge of legacy and are also bound by less stringent regulations compared to banks. The key for banks is to modernize and transform their application landscape to gain level playing field. Nutanix Hybrid cloud platform serves both existing as well as new applications at the same time helps build agility through automation in DevOps and infra workflow.
EWS has become the norm. How is technology powering this?
D Venkatesh: Technology systems have come a long way when it comes to predictive algorithms. Risk and fraud systems can now sift through terabytes of collated data to create models which can then quite easily be used to locate, well ahead of time, customers who may default. The pandemic has fast-tracked the adoption of EWS by our customers. AI/ML driven scorecards for address verifications, migrant risk evaluations, geographical risk evaluations and geofencing.
Rajesh Krishnia: At the infrastructure or the platform layer, Nutanix provides anomaly detection to prevent a malicious attack which is directed towards technology gap. Its AI/ML engine provides Lentra auto remediation functionality to seamlessly run application without any problem.
How is technology facilitating TAT reduction without compromising compliance and risk management?
D Venkatesh: Digital data sources are increasingly being used to augment applicant data for quicker superior decisions. Lentra’s Business Rules Manager (BREX) lets a bank run a comprehensive rule set on extensive data received from various sources in real-time. We see our customers typically configure the system to make 3 calls to our BREX solution during an application process, compared to a single calling traditional banking BRE systems. Our customers call this feature multi-BRE.
Rajesh Krishnia: FSI customers are looking at platform players to provide then capabilities like WORM, Encryption with KMS, BCP, Anomaly detection and Remediation to enhance their compliance and risk management. For us at Nutanix, security and compliance are part of our software development life cycle and not an after-thought.
How are you icing the lending process management with analytics?
D Venkatesh: Extensive analytics is built right into the LentraGoNoGo system. Data and analytics are key when it comes to widely distributed loan products. Newer areas of opportunity lie around the data driven development of tailored products, cross product sales, channel integrations, embedded finance, customer acquisition and risk-based pricing.
Rajesh Krishnia: Nutanix makes data storage and access management very easy as storage, compute, networking, availability and security come together in the hyper converged cluster infrastructure.
What technology paradigms will create further efficiency in lending?
D Venkatesh: India needs industry wide standards / policies for secure data sharing and exchange while managing the customer’s privacy with explicit consent. Some of these paradigms are unfolding quite nicely today in the form of OCEN, Sahamati the consent framework, and Account Aggregators.
Rajesh Krishnia: Customers are today looking at digital transformation of their business, including lending, on a hybrid cloud journey in conjunction with workforce modernization. Management simplicity and workload mobility are key foundations on which new lending tech platforms will be built.
