Reducing the turnaround time for loan approvals from 7-10 days to 24-48 hours using AI/ML

One of the pain points that the Biz2X platform has sought to resolve through its platform is to reduce the waiting time to approve a loan application. In a traditional bank setup, there are multiple departments involved in processing a loan application including credit, onboarding, and operations, which can result in a longer turnaround time of around 7-10 days – particularly if there are multiple systems and silos across departments. Biz2X provides a unified platform to improve the efficiency of the credit application process, resulting in a 3-5X reduction in the turnaround time.

A key component of Biz2X ability to improve process efficiency for loan applications is its use of AI/ML to digitalize and analyze customer information. This starts from the moment the enterprise submits its application, which includes Know Your Customer (KYC) information to identify and verify the company’s registration, directors, authorized signatories, ownership structure, and recent bank statements among other requirements. This compares to a typical bank setup whereby an onboarding team has to manually record and verify a customer’s identification details into a customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Biz2X also uses a proprietary AI/ML model to determine the creditworthiness of its applicants based on bank statements or transaction data. The model estimates the applicant’s revenue, expenses, and seasonality to generate a cash flow analysis for the customer, which calculates the enterprise’s credit risk.

Biz2X has powers small business lending at brands like HSBC and Popular Bank, among others. With enhanced loan management, servicing, risk analytics, and a configurable customer journey, Biz2X is helping banks like these run their lending operations at scale.

Biz2X uses a streamlined user interface, AI-driven analytics and a customizable white label environment to help banks enhance their core services such as offering focused customer service, growing their portfolio, and increasing the use of their different products. The Biz2X Platform offers end-to-end loan management features, including:

Also, Advances in risk management are among the greatest benefits for Biz2X customers. Biz2X uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) extensively to automate key risk assessment tasks. Through a combination of natural language processing, image analytics, and using data from tens of millions of financial transactions by small and medium businesses, Biz2X offers banks a way to automate manual tasks in the underwriting process and improve the customer experience. Mr. Vineet Tyagi, Global CTO, Biz2X in a discussion with CXOToday share more insights on the same.

• How intelligent automation can drive digital transformation across financial institutions?

ANS – As the financial landscape is transforming with Fintechs, intelligent automation can restructure manual interventions and offer autonomous decision-making capabilities for process automation. From customer onboarding, fraud detection to loan underwriting, intelligent automation tools are being used aggressively by banks to offer a seamless and hassle-free experience to the customers.

• How AI and Big Data is simplifying the financial processes?

ANS – AI, Big Data, and Analytics-based platforms manage and analyze large amounts of data available. They uncover hidden patterns, correlations and offer deeper insights to innovatively visualize results for better decision making. This further can help banks and insurers to significantly improve risk management, through improved and (more) real-time insights into the customer behavior.

With AI-driven Biz2X’s Bank Statement Analyzer, banks and other lenders can easily analyze the bank statements.  The tool helps in categorization (computing the total loan amount) and statistical analysis (minimum monthly balance, average credit card payment, etc.) to reveal the important aspects such as monthly income of the borrower, his current debts, insurance status and nature of spending.

Biz2X also uses AI and Big Data to simplify financial processes for lenders through its other advanced tools such as Business Score Analyzer and Collection Management System.

• How is Biz2X’s proprietary technology helping banks to make accurate credit decisions instantly?

Ans – Biz2X platform is truly an agile solution and the below mentioned are some of the key differentiators that make us stand apart from other lending systems

• Omni-channel digital application – User-friendly experience to handle direct customers through a mobile or a desktop or in-branch relationship manager and with an easily configurable DSA.
• Extensive Product Types- Various types of retail, business, and SME loans (Secured as well as Unsecured) can be provided through the platform.
• True End to End in Capability – Biz2X offers a comprehensive, end-to-end Digital Lending Platform that manages the entire loan cycle right from customer sourcing and origination (using APIs) to collections. The platform also takes care of underwriting processes, loan servicing, and management.
• Flexibility- Fully configurable rules and decision engines with knock-out criteria and auto approvals make the addition of new products much easier and intuitive.
• Risk- Customizable scorecards to enhance assessment including industry-based risk, cash flow analysis, & monitoring.
• Integrations- Built-in 3rd party data integrations to support multiple product types – Fully India Ready.
• Go-Live- It can be up and running in 90-120 days, this also is true for changes in the systems post-go-live.
• Security- We’re SOC2 & ISO27001 certified and have passed rigorous audits
• TCO – Being a SaaS platform, we do not need expensive hardware for deployment and the TCO is thus a fraction of what you have already spent on your Legacy Lending Solutions.
• In the conventional banking model, the lending process is paperwork-heavy for the customer and expensive for the bank. How Biz2X Platform is helping banks to streamline that process through its SaaS-based model?

ANS – Biz2X Platform is designed for banks that are ready to streamline their processes. It provides its proprietary SaaS-based models to banks so that they can make accurate credit decisions instantly and offer loans to their small business clients within days instead of weeks and months.

This can be owed to the Biz2X dynamic features like open API integration, configurable rule engines and workflows, Bank Statement Analyzers and GST Insights, rich UI/UX capability with UI Orchestration, and finally all this with low cost of ownership and shifting to a true SaaS-based Customer pricing.

HSBC India has been using Biz2X platform for multiple lines of business in India and they have cited an improvement in Turn Around Time (TAT) for their Relationship Managers of more than 200%.

• Digital innovations are driving the banking sector of India towards a paradigm shift. What are the measures taken by your brand to boost this drive?

ANS – Biz2X uses a streamlined user interface, AI-driven analytics, and a customizable white label environment to help banks enhance their core services such as offering focused customer service, growing their portfolio, and increasing the use of their products. The Biz2X Platform offers end-to-end loan management features, including:-

• End to end Digital Native Lending Platform
• Configurable rule engine and Workflows powering the Underwriting and User Journeys.
• Rich UI/UX capability with UI Orchestration
• AI-based analytical engine across the Platform for deeper insights.
• Bank Statement Analyzers, GST Insights as well as Continuous Risk Monitoring.
• Low code Platform – helping faster roll-out including white-labeled journeys.
• Deployment Flexibility – Dockerized Platform, private and industry cloud
• While it’s difficult to make predictions, what according to you is the future of automation in the Fintech industry?

ANS – Fintech will be leading the Financial Services sector in the near Future and in the coming time they will compete with the much more Formal Banking Sector head on. There is already Open Banking and Neo Banking which is due to the lack of regulatory leeway collaborating with the Banks. Some of the Neo Banks has created a very large Customer base and this Customer base is tremendously loyal to these Fintechs. Today Banks are relying on Customer inertia to abandon the Formal Banking Services; this exit barrier will keep diminishing to the point of inflection where the Formal Banking Structure will become redundant in the world.

• What are the future plans of Biz2X in coming 12-14 months?

ANS – Biz2X started 2022 with some exciting launches starting with the Maadhyam. Our recently launched middleware platform “Maadhyam” is getting an amazing response from the markets. We already have leads from big banks and corporates for Maadhyam.

In the coming 12-14, our aim is to strengthen the middleware platform along with –

• We are planning to hire 350 + employees in the coming 12-14 months. This increase in headcount will be from entry-level to middle management positions in multiple areas including the more sought-after areas like Cloud Computing, Data Sciences and AI/ML.
• Investing in better and innovative Financial products for India – this is already happening and the pace of this will pick up further.
• Investing in the Ecosystem in India where we will build strategic partnerships with Data providers and in newer solutions like Account Aggregators, OCEN, etc.
• We are aggressively forging strategic partnerships with Fintechs and forward-looking Banks to create better Unit Economics on Lending for them. Here as true innovators, we invest in our relationship with our partners rather than simply becoming a vendor to them. We base our pricing models on their success and hence, we are a big investor in their success.