Digitisation push makes BFSI sector attractive to SaaS players

BENGALURU: The year that passed was a good one for software-as-aservice (Saas) startups in the country , as niche verticals such as hospitality and wellness saw growth in the Indian market and adopted newer technology into their systems. The next sector that is likely to create opportunities for more SaaS players in 2017 is the banking, financial services and insurance ( BFSI) sector, especially in the light of the government's push for digitisation.

Services such as credit score analysis, loan process automation and fraud detection through software are already on offer by companies such as online lending platform Lendingkart, financial marketplace CoinTribe and data analytics startup IQLECT.

SaaS companies operate on a business model that offer software solutions over the internet, charging their customers based on the usage of the software. With the country's financial solutions going online, institutions including banks, micro finance institutions, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and online merchants are likely to turn to software providers for transition.


Lendingkart, which provides business loans to entrepreneurs and small businesses uses an in-house credit risk analytics tools to evaluate the credit-worthiness of an applicant. The company has announced it will be pushing this software-as-aservice for financial institutions.

The software uses around 2,000 data points such as business cycles of the company , industry growth and spending pattern of the businessman to evaluate the credit score and corresponding interest rate for the business owner.

"When we started off, we thought of creating this as a core technology. But we were asked to test if our credit scoring works and hence decided to get into lending," said Harshvardhan Lunia, cofounder of Lendingkart, adding that the company will now be providing its credit analytics software as a service to NBFCs and banks. The company is yet to formalise a partnership on its SaaS offering. CoinTribe, a financial marketplace that connects business owners to lending companies, has signed up with two private sector banks for its SaaS product that automates loan management process for banks, with one bank already going live with it.

"Our SaaS solutions includes risk analysis and loan origination and automates the process, making it cost efficient and time efficient for banks," said Amit Sachdev, CEO of CoinTribe.

The company's software evaluates 500 data points to gauge a business' health and provides this data to the lenders on its platform.

Big data analytics startup IQLECT, which also provides solutions to the fintech industry , has also signed up with three digital payment companies to create a dynamic mapping between the payment issuer and the gateway so as to reduce payment failure rates. The software could be used by merchants and payment companies as a service. The startup has also developed a real-time fraud detection software that will help in predictive monitoring of financial services.