Need a home loan approval within days? This startup says it uses tech to reduce turnaround times

Buying a home in India involves extensive paperwork—and running around multiple offices and banks to secure a loan—costing both time and money. The pandemic has made the process even more tedious due to reduced bank staff and COVID-19 protocols.

Founded in 2021, Mumbai-based Easiloan claims to ease these housing loan bottlenecks by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).

Easiloan claims that the turnaround time for customers applying for home loans through its platform is less than a week while the turnaround time for overall disbursement of loans is reduced by 70 percent. Usually, it takes about three to four weeks for processing home loans, and this time can extend if there are documentation issues.

The platform says that it acts as an intermediary between lenders and borrowers, and suggests best home loan offers based on certain metrics.

Easiloan has onboarded SBI, LIC, HDFC, PNB Housing Finance, among others, as lenders. The platform also helps lenders to offer loans to different segments of customers such as AAA customers, non-salaried employees and more.

The platform was founded by Pramod Kathuria and Vishal Dawda in April 2021.

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After being in stealth mode for three months, Easiloan launched its operations in July 2021. Pramod brings with him two decades of experience in home finance and real estate, having worked with groups like L&T, GMR Group and Lodha Group. Vishal, who had worked with the likes of Lodha Group and HDFC Realty, moved on from Easiloan in January 2022.

With a 50-member team, Easiloan claims to have processed over 750 home loans within two months. The startup says it reached out to real estate developers as over 50 percent of primary home loan buyers could be tapped through these channels.

Since then, the number has increased to 1,500 home loan applications, amounting to over Rs 500 crores, across the three cities.

The startup’s revenue model is based on a percent fee commission that banks pay it on every disbursal case that happens through its platform. The service is free for Easiloan.

It raised Rs 8 Crore in its maiden funding round led by Tomorrow Capita in September 2021. From then till February 2022, the number of loans disbursed has seen a cumulative rise of 75 percent.

Commenting on its investment, Rohini Prakash, CEO of Tomorrow Capital, told YourStory, “We’re very excited about partnering with Easiloan as it aims to solve some of the large issues plaguing the home loan industry, providing a vastly improved customer experience by allowing customers to make informed decisions about their home loans, and much smoother digital home loan processing.”

A platform for all stakeholders

In the beginning, the platform worked as a match-making engine to help customers compare and choose the best lending partner. For this, it reached out to real estate developers to capture the largest pool of home loan customer leads with the highest conversion percentage.

Since its maiden funding round, it has become a full-stack home loan solutions provider, making it simple and easier for all stakeholders in the housing loan process.

Its unified onboarding application, launched in October 2021, collects customer data, analyses and verifies it and then provides pre-sanction advice.

“It is a comprehensive yet simple online journey that matches you to the best offer, opens the portal for digital submission of home loan application and the back-end engine then delivers a requisite sanction after studying your financials. Our platform also gives developers or channel partners the real-time visibility of sales success and hence incoming cash flow,” Pramod tells YourStory.

As of March 31, 2021, Easiloan made an approximate revenue of Rs 4 lakh, according to the RoC filings made by the company. The team has not disclosed the revenue details of the last financial year.

Tapping into fintech

According to Allied Market Research reports, the global fintech lending market size was valued at $449.89 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $4,957.16 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 27.4 percent from 2021 to 2030.

With market competitors such as PolicyBazaar, MoneyTap, and BASIC Home Loan, Easiloan is one of the few startups tapping into the potential of automating the housing loan process. Pramod feels that the pandemic played a pivotal role in increasing the demand for fintech platforms that reduced the hassle of sanctioning loans.

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However, building a one-stop platform has its own challenges. One of them is onboarding banks and realtors who would trust the process of new-age home loans services.

“For us to engage and integrate banks, lending institutions and real estate experts into Easiloan was one of the biggest challenges. But thorough market research helped us to get the mandate from all stakeholders, including the customers,” Pramod says.

Easiloan plans to build more products across the home loan chain, such as balance transfers, loans against property, among others. They also plan to take a significant majority market share of digital home loans in India by FY23.