CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Varun Bhalla, Country Manager, Provenir India
- Please define Provenir and the kind of products and services it offers.
Provenir helps fintechs and financial services providers make smarter decisions faster with our AI-Powered Data and Decisioning Platform.
Provenir brings together key data, AI and dcisioning capabilities to help power rapid approvals that drive world-class customer experiences. This unique offering gives organizations the ability to power decisioning innovation across the full customer lifecycle, driving improvements in the customer experience, access to financial services, business agility, and more. Combining data, AI and decisioning enables organizations to more accurately identify fraud, assess credit risk and optimizing pricing, while mitigating bias through data diversity.
Provenir works with disruptive financial services organizations in more than 50 countries and processes more than 3 billion transactions annually.
- Can you explain the company’s history/legacy globally and its vision for the Indian market? Also, describe how it has evolved so far.
Provenir was founded in 2004, and has made significant investments over the past few years to expand into new markets, grow the team and continue providing industry-leading products to serve our customers. India has the third largest fintech ecosystem and is growing by almost 24% annually. Digital lending is growing at an even faster pace. At the same time, a large percentage of the Indian population remains unbanked. The opportunity to provide digital finance to this underserved population is enormous.
3. How does Provenir differentiate itself from other AI-powered decisioning platforms in the country?
Our competitive differentiators are the usability, speed and agility our platform offers. It is the only unified platform combining real-time, on-demand data access, embedded AI and world-class decisioning technology. We also offer the Provenir Marketplace which is a one-stop data hub that offers easy access through a single API to data sources covering open banking, KYC, fraud, verification, social media, etc. We currently have more than 100 data vendors around the world in the Marketplace with about 25 of them providing India-focused data. The Provenir Marketplace makes it easy for customers to access both traditional and alternative data sources and bring that data into their decisioning models.
4. What role do technology and innovation play in Provenir India’s future growth strategy and how the company is planning to leverage it?
Provenir established a global technology and operations hub in India to meet the growing demand from fintechs and financial services providers for the company’s data and AI-powered risk decisioning software not just in India, but South Asia and the rest of the Asia Pacific. The hub serves as a centralized location for Provenir global technical teams to develop new solutions to solve customers’ most significant challenges. We plan to continue investing to grow our presence and deliver innovative solutions for our customers.
5. How is Provenir India addressing the changing needs and preferences of its existing customer base and what measures is it taking to attract new customers in an increasingly competitive market?
We work with lenders of all sizes – from small business lenders to larger established financial services providers. When we speak to lenders, the requirements we hear consistently are access to data to make better decisions and being able to leverage new technology to make access to credit easier for customers in India. Our platform is unified but also modular so we can help organizations wherever they are on their journey. We are also often asked how organizations in other parts of the world are using our platform so we are sharing best practices to help elevate their knowledge of what’s possible. Provenir has been in business since 2004 so we have vast experience with designing decisioning solutions for a variety of financial services products and use cases including, unsecured loans, two-wheeler and auto financing, SME lending, mortgage financing, consumer lending, telco and more.
6. What are the key disruptions that you have witnessed in the past couple of years in the financial sector?
The digital lending landscape has experienced rapid change including new regulatory requirements and increased customer demand for personalized products which has forced lenders to really examine their existing credit risk technology platforms.
The IndiaStack including Aadhar, UPI and Account Aggregator (AA) and Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN) has provided access to large volumes of non-traditional or alternative data sources. In order to orchestrate this data and make real-time decisions requires lenders to have technology systems that are agile, easy to use and can scale rapidly while providing customized offerings to customers.
7. In what ways can the use of AI in risk decisioning contribute to a transformation of the credit risk decision-making process as a whole?
Artificial intelligence provides lenders with more options beyond traditional decisioning capabilities. For example, AI has high utility when dealing with unbanked customers; enabling financial service providers to use alternative data and deliver superior customer experiences across the customer lifecycle. Instead of relying on traditional credit scoring methods, AI solutions will identify new patterns for a more optimised decisioning method. This also enables lenders to expand their customer base while effectively managing risk. At the same time, self-learning AI models can spot irregularities instantly – minimising the occurrence of fraud. AI analytics also empower organisation with data insights, enabling personalised pricing for each unique application while increasing profitability for the enterprise.
