Paisabazaar.com reaches $1.1 billion annualized loan disbursal rate

Paisabazaar.com, India's largest digital marketplace for consumer credit, has announced that it has reached an annualised loan disbursal rate of $ 1.1 billion (excluding credit card issuance). In December 2021, the fintech disbursed Rs 695 crore of loans, which included unsecured loans like personal and business loans and secured loans like Home Loans and Loan Against Property.

Since March 2020, the pandemic had deeply impacted the lending industry, and Paisabazaar says along with external factors like the lockdown, moratorium and overall economic disruptions, the lack of digital infrastructure within the lending industry and over-reliance on physical processes led to plummeting of supply of new credit. However, with a gradual and steady resumption of economic activities and shift towards digital-led lending processes within the industry, lending volumes have steadily increased in the last 12-15 months, albeit a brief lean period caused by the second covid wave in April-May 2021.

"As challenging as it was, the pandemic has proved to be an inflection point for the lending industry, where we now have more digital-focused processes, robust Underwriting models and sustainable systems. As the country's leading marketplace platform, we have strongly focussed on deepening partnerships and building digital infrastructure in the last 18 months, to serve the credit needs of our diverse consumer segments seamlessly," said Naveen Kukreja, CEO & Co-founder, Paisabazaar.com.

According to Paisabazaar, as the lockdown restrictions were eased and economic activities resumed, it has been able to serve the credit needs of customers from a larger number of geographies. It, currently, receives over 1 million enquiries for credit on its platform, and to date has served the needs of customers from over 1200 cities and towns.

In December alone, customers from 668 cities and towns accessed credit through the Paisabazaar platform.

Digital processes on Paisabazaar include innovations like Digital KYC through c-KYC integration and Offline XML-based Aadhar KYC, Video-KYC, Liveliness checks through video, Digital documents upload/validation, e-Mandates, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), e-Sign etc. to digitize all legs of the lending process.

With increased digitization and rising demand for credit throughout the country, Paisabazaar.com today disburses a higher share of loans to geographies, outside the Top 5 metros of Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Chennai, Bengaluru and Kolkata. On average, 55 per cent of the total value of loans in a month are disbursed to Paisabazaar customers from outside the top 5 cities.

Also, the platform is witnessing a higher number of loans being disbursed to younger consumer segments. Over 50 per cent of the number of loans that are disbursed through Paisabazaar in a month are taken by customers less than 35 years of age, 26 per cent by customers less than 30.