Faircent raises undisclosed funding from Mohandas Pai's Aarin Capital Partners
Faircent has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Mohandas Pai through Aarin Capital Partners. Mohandas Pai will be joining the advisory board in the team. With these recent development, the P2P lending platform aims to focus more on its mobile technology and in expanding its technology team.
Vinay Mathews,Co-founder and COO of Faircent, says that with Mohandas Pai on board, the company will be strengthening its leadership in credit appraisal and mobile technology.
Talking about joining the advisory board and making one of the first fintech investments in the P2P lending marketplace, Mohandas says that there is an under-served segment in the market that lacks access to credit. He adds that curated P2P lending will be an excellent way to reach the market. Mohandas also notes that Faircent not only gives access but also reduces the cost of capital through a unique reverse-auction engine.
On the business front, Rajat Gandhim, Co-founder and CEO of Faircent, claims that the team has been able to build a solid technology-enabled credit model. They have hired some of the best talent in the industry and unlocked a huge latent consumer need to lend money,he adds. “Today our challenge is to provide credit-worthy borrowers to our over 3,000 lenders,” Rajat explains.
The company recently also announced alliances with TransUnion and Yodlee. Rajat says they want to empower every individual with surplus money to reach out to borrowers This would bring down the cost of capital for borrowers, he adds. Vinay says that as they leverage technology, borrowers receive the direct benefit of the lean and technology enhanced operations. Faircent has deployments and commitments in excess of Rs three crore from individual lenders using the marketplace.
The company has a simple and transparent revenue model: just like any classified website, it only charges listing fees from both borrower and lenders. Presently, the listing fees is Rs 1,500 for both borrowers and lenders to borrow or lend up to Rs 1.5 lakh.
In the next 12 months, the team intends to focus on mobile, both to enable lenders and borrowers to transact and use mobile data for better credit appraisal. Rajat says that their objective is to make sure a loan gets disbursed in under 10 minutes. “We want to be faster than Uber; the internal target is that a borrower should get a loan before a Uber arrives at his doorstep,” he adds.
The company is targeting over Rs 800 to 1,000 crore of disbursement in the next three to four years. By 2016, the Indian loan market is expected to reach a size of Rs 21,980.6 billion with a CAGR of 18.7 per cent. Rajat believes that a large portion of the loan market will move to P2P models.
