CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Rishabh Goel, Co-Founder and CEO, Credgenics.
- Explain the role Credgenics plays in the debt collections industry and how you differentiate yourselves from other players in the market?
Since its inception in 2018, Credgenics has been transforming the debt collections industry by offering an end-to-end collections management platform for banks, NBFCs, and fintechs. The platform is designed to streamline loan recovery workflows, from pre-due stages to multiple delinquency buckets and field operations to legal actions, through proprietary tech tools and a data-based approach.
At Credgenics, we pride ourselves on our modular approach to debt collection, which provides our customers with the flexibility to pick and choose modules or opt for a complete platform. This approach allows our clients to customize their collections management strategies to fit their unique business requirements.
Moreover, our platform offers real-time visibility into the status of our clients’ entire collections portfolio, allowing them to understand the details at various hierarchical levels and take necessary steps in accordance with their business strategy. We understand that compliance requirements in the financial sector are constantly evolving, and our technology platform enables lenders to ensure complete adherence to these regulations.
At Credgenics, we differentiate ourselves from other players in the market by leveraging the power of digital technology to create an effective communication channel that seamlessly connects lenders with borrowers. By enhancing customer experiences and engagements during the collections phase, we increase loan recovery rates and reduce collection costs.
- What motivated you to start Credgenics and how did you identify your business model?
Credgenics was born out of a deep-rooted desire to drive transformation in the collections management space. We firmly believe that if lenders are confident about collecting loans, it reduces their cost of lending, incentivizes them to lend to new-to-credit segments and explore new geographies, which eventually facilitates financial inclusion and spreads awareness about maintaining a healthy credit profile.
We identified a significant gap in the collections management space. While banks and other lenders have access to a wealth of data points from customers and processes, they are not using it effectively to drive innovation and transformation in collections. Through the Credgenics team’s research and interactions, we realized that collections processes are largely broken, manual-effort oriented, error-prone, time-consuming, inefficient, and outdated. We saw an opportunity to leverage the power of technology and data to create an integrated, end-to-end collections management platform that would revolutionize the industry.
Credgenics’ has a SaaS-based operating business model that works well with lenders of all sizes. The platform is easy to implement, configure and use, and it suits the needs of multiple complex credit products, lines of business, borrower personas and geographical flavors. In conclusion, at Credgenics, we are driven by a passion for leveraging technology and data to transform the collections management space.
- What role do you see technology playing in the future of debt collections? How will Credgenics take advantage of these developments?
As the debt collections industry evolves, technology is expected to play a crucial role in driving the entire narrative for reimagining debt collections. Lenders are beginning to realize the positive impact that this transformation can make to their businesses, and Credgenics is at the forefront of this change.
At Credgenics, we have already created a huge impact on the lending ecosystem through our integrated technology platform, which allows lenders to streamline and manage their loan recovery workflow, including litigations, billings, payments and collections — from pre-due stages to multiple delinquency buckets and field operations to legal actions. Our proprietary tech tools and data-based approach have enabled us to create an effective communication channel with borrowers, increasing loan recovery rates and reducing collection costs.
In the future, collections processes will need to be significantly automated, digitized, and become human touch-less. We believe that a large portion of collections can happen via digital mode, and personalization and tailoring of processes can make a lot of difference on outcomes. Human efforts can be more aligned to complex stages while routine tasks can be easily machine focused. Data-driven insights can be extremely useful in identifying gaps, focus areas, and mitigation efforts. Credgenics will continue to leverage the latest technological developments to provide our clients with the most effective collections management solutions, ensuring complete adherence to rapidly evolving compliance requirements, and enhancing customer experiences and engagements during the collections phase.
- What specific technology tools or platforms do you use? Whatever can be shared.
At Credgenics, we recognize the importance of harnessing cutting-edge technology to deliver actionable delinquent credit analytics and collection assessment insights to financial firms. We believe that our platform can enable lenders to take collections completely in-house with minimum human intervention by applying our flagship AI/ML tools for recovery chance predictors.
Our sentiment analysis tool is a perfect example of how technology can be leveraged to improve debt collection rates. It uses speech recognition and analysis of chats over automated voice bots and WhatsApp bots to generate insights about borrowers. By using sentiment analysis, lending institutions can improve their debt collection rates by 15-20% and recover 70-95% of their bad debts.
In addition to sentiment analysis, Credgenics has a microservice-based architecture deployed over Kubernetes to enable auto-scaling. Our platform is built with a modern technology stack that includes front-end technologies such as ReactJS and Native Android, back-end technologies like Postgres, Redis, and SQS, and coding languages like Python. We leverage cloud-native technology, voicebots, and API-based architecture to ensure that our platform is scalable, secure, and reliable.
We believe that our focus on technology will continue to be a key driver of our growth and success in the future. We will continue to leverage cutting-edge technology tools to improve the efficiency, speed, and accuracy of our debt collection platform, and help our clients to achieve their collection goals.
- Do you use data analytics-based insights?
Credgenics utilizes data analytics-based insights to provide lenders with valuable information about their customers and to optimize their collections processes. With the help of advanced Machine Learning capabilities and models, Credgenics is able to extract deep insights from customer data. This includes identifying the best collections strategies to be adopted, predicting which customers are likely to become delinquent, mapping and predicting customer behavior, assessing intent to pay accurately, and providing tailored communications to customers. By leveraging data analytics, Credgenics is able to provide lenders with a more personalized and effective approach to debt collections, which can ultimately result in higher recovery rates and improved customer satisfaction.
- What specific role does AI and ML play digital debt collection?
One of the most significant benefits of AI and ML in debt collection is the ability to identify intent to pay without human intervention. AI-powered chatbots can comprehend the intent behind the customers’ requests, take into account every customer’s conversation history while interacting with them, and respond to their inquiries in a humane manner. This helps in streamlining the collections process, reducing the need for manual intervention, and improving overall efficiency. AI and ML can also drive human-like borrower engagements, identifying patterns to recommend actions, and many more use cases. Overall, AI and ML are transforming the debt collection industry, making it more efficient and effective for lenders and borrowers alike.
- What specific services does Credgenics give to customers?
At Credgenics, we provide our customers with a range of services to help streamline their debt collection processes end-to-end. One of our key offerings is the ability to automate communications, allowing us to send targeted emails, text messages and voice messages to borrowers based on their specific segments. We can also trigger communication sequences based on borrower actions, ensuring that our messages are always timely and effective. Additionally, we have tools to help prioritize accounts with a greater chance of getting paid, and we track every call to ensure that we are always making the most of our communications efforts.
Another important service we offer is efficient field visit debt collection, thanks to our integration with Google Maps. By using the Credgenics mobile app CG Collect, field agents can easily find and reach borrowers, making the debt collection process much more transparent and efficient. We also provide automated legal notices, allowing us to draft notices automatically and track them in one convenient dashboard. Additionally, we offer access to the best legal experts and can automate the entire legal workflow to help manage all cases efficiently.
Finally, we provide our customers with tools to track collection efficiency performance, allowing them to see which agents are delivering results and identify gaps in the collections process. This helps to ensure that our customers are always making the most of their resources and maximizing their recovery efforts.
- Are there business collaborations that have helped your customers? How?
Yes, Credgenics has formed various business collaborations that have been highly beneficial for its customers. For instance, IREP Credit Capital has partnered with Credgenics to push digital solutions for MSME customers in South India. This partnership has resulted in a threefold rise in field recoveries, a 50% increase in the number of field trips, and a 35% increase in field collections via digital payments. Similarly, Mahindra Finance has partnered with Credgenics to digitally empower the retail loan collections. Another digital lending platform, RupeeRedee, has also collaborated with Credgenics to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Data Analytics-based approach toward debt collections. Additionally, SarvaGram, a FinTech lender focused on rural India, is extending financial inclusion and digitizing debt collections by implementing the mobile-based field loan collections platform – CG Collect – from Credgenics, the leading provider of SaaS-based collections and debt-recovery technology platforms worldwide.
- What have been the biggest milestones for Credgenics so far? What is the next major milestone?
Credgenics has achieved several major milestones that have contributed to its success. We have over 100 customers, which include banks, NBFCs, Fintech lenders, MFI, and ARCs. Our revenue has grown by an impressive 700% since our last fundraise, and our customers have grown by 5X. We currently have offices in 5 locations, including three offices in Delhi NCR and one each in Hyderabad, Mumbai, Jakarta, and Singapore. We manage 60 million loan accounts annually, and our platform has been recognized as the #1 Best-selling Retail Loan Collections platform in India by IBS Intelligence in their Annual Sales League Table 2022. Our employee strength has also grown from 50 to 300+ employees, and we have expanded to South East Asia.
Moving forward, our next major milestone is to continue expanding globally and become a leading digital debt collection platform worldwide. We are constantly innovating and improving our platform to offer the best possible solutions to our customers. We also aim to continue growing our customer base and revenue, while maintaining our commitment to providing exceptional customer service and helping our clients recover outstanding debts.
