Monsoon CreditTech becomes part of Mastercard's Start Path program, secures new funding

Monsoon CreditTech has become one of the seven fintech companies from across the world and the only one from India selected by Mastercard Start Path, part of Mastercard Labs, to be part of its startup engagement program.

Start Path is designed to help later stage startups scale their business. This puts Monsoon in an elite club of companies and will give Monsoon access to Mastercard's global network of customers and subject matter experts, bringing Monsoon's machine learning technology to global markets outside India.
Monsoon says it has also recently closed a new round of undisclosed amount in funding from strategic institutional and individual investors from across the globe ranging from geographies such as USA, UK, UAE and India.


The digital shift
As the volume of data available for analysis grows and computational power becomes cheaper, banks and financial institutions are beginning to realize the potentially transformational benefits of embracing Artificial Intelligence (of which machine learning is a subset).

As they internalize the threat of losing market share to FinTech companies and lenders who aggressively adopt these technologies, Monsoon CreditTech sees them embracing AI/ML, Blockchain and other cutting-edge technologies.

Ashwini Anand, the Founder of Monsoon CreditTech feels that this is just the beginning. "The future of lending is digital and fully powered by Artificial Intelligence. The bank of the not so distant future won't have branches or credit underwriters. Machine learning powered loan underwriting is a step in that direction."

Monsoon is a fintech company, but at the same time is an antithesis. The startup's ambition is not to replace banks or established financial institutions, but to get them ready to leverage new technologies that can add another dimension to their operations. Monsoon CreditTech's technology, which captures and leverages patterns unique to each lender's loan portfolio, is used by 16 banks, NBFCs, HFCs & Fintechs across India to minimize bad loan rates, raise loan approval rates and maximize portfolio profitability. Monsoon says its machine learning programme can save at least 20% of a bank NPA.

One for all
Run by a team of data scientists and financial analysts who were with organizations like Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, The World Bank and American Express, Monsoon wants to democratize machine learning among India's NBFCs, banks and finTech enabled lenders.

"When corporates and startups work together, we seed innovation which becomes the eventual delivery of real solutions and successes," said Amy Neale, Vice President and global lead for Mastercard Start Path. "At Mastercard, we scour the globe for the cutting-edge startups like Monsoon CreditTech that are ready for scale and to shape the future of commerce."

Sandeep Menon, a senior banker and Founder MD of Vastu Housing Finance says he is a big believer of the transformational power of technologies such as artificial intelligence and advanced analytics. "After studying what other players in this market have to offer, we started working with Monsoon. We think that its technology platform has the potential to help make our lending systems more efficient, potentially leading to higher loan disbursements and lower credit costs by leveraging Data science better loan underwriting & risk management," says Menon.

Monsoon has been able to convince its clients on what it has to offer and this gets validated when clients become investors. Shivashish Chatterjee, a former Managing Director of Citigroup and the Co-Founder and Joint-MD of DMI Finance observed Monsoon CreditTech's work over two years and subsequently along with his co-founder, Yuvraja Singh, decided to participate in Monsoon's latest fund-raise. Thus, The Sparkle Fund, an Alternative Investment Fund and a vehicle of DMI's asset management arm aimed at early stage tech investments became Monsoon CreditTech's first institutional investor.

Chatterjee says machine learning technology brings tremendous power and speed to the lending process, enabling lenders like DMI to reduce risk while improving its ability to lend to people whom it may otherwise have not been able to service. "There are a limited number of players in the region who have been able to successfully leverage AI/ML to add meaningful value to lenders and we are happy to invest in one such player today - Monsoon CreditTech. They've built some very interesting intellectual property and I think that they have the potential to grow to be one of the impactful players in this space," says Chatterjee.

Monsoon has earlier raised funding from marquee investors like Rajan Anandan, Sunil Kalra, former Microsoft senior executive Rishi Srivastava, and Aditya Singh. Other investors include some of the top financial investors and business houses in the country.