How tech helped Muthoot FinCorp expand its customer base with curated products
Shaji Varghese, CEO of Muthoot FinCorp, discusses how the Kerala-based NBFC is leveraging technology to expand its customer base and come out with personalised products.
Dabbling with technology early on has paid rich dividends for one of India’s largest NBFCs, Muthoot FinCorp—a part of the 138-year-old Muthoot Pappachan Group—in terms of better customer experience and higher efficiency. It's safe to say that this is just the beginning.
With an asset under management (AUM) of over Rs 36,787 crore on a standalone basis at the end of first quarter of FY26, Muthoot FinCorp offers an array of financial products, including loans, savings, investments, payments, and other services, across its more than 3,700 branches, serving more than 1.25 lakh customers daily.
This expansive network and services are stitched through technology, and the company is constantly on the lookout for the next innovation to incorporate in its operations and services.
“Constant innovation happens through technology, and we adopt things that are contemporary as well as relevant to our customers,” says Shaji Varghese, CEO of Muthoot FinCorp, in an interaction with Enterprise Story.
New RBI co-lending rulebook tightens risk-sharing, reporting for co-lending, scraps double KYC
About four years ago, the NBFC set up a data lake to mine information to find new customer insights. The key benefit of this was the creation of a product recommendation engine, allowing the company to launch offerings tailored to a specific customer profile. Other tech offerings include digital KYC, facial recognition, etc.
“Many of our customers do not know that they can get credit, but we know their financial history, and this helps in coming out with tailor-made products,” says Varghese.
For instance, gold loans make up the core of Muthoot FinCorp’s business, and the NBFC has been disbursing money to its customers without a wet signature and a paperless KYC process. “We have mapped what can be purely digital and that which requires physical presence. Not everything is done digitally, especially when it concerns gold,” Varghese clarifies.
Muthhoot FinCorp disburses around 96% of the gold loans through digital signatures, with 6 lakh monthly disbursements. Further, top-ups and renewals are fully automated after loan disbursal. In fact, it provides gold loans at the customers’ doorsteps if the loan ticket size crosses Rs 3 lakh.
Driving these technology initiatives are the company’s two technology arms based in Thiruvanthapuram and Bengaluru, besides third-party partners.
Further, this has opened the door for a new set of customers: small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Varghese claims that Muthoot FinCorp’s SME loan products can be availed online, where it has partnered with fintech companies to get access to customers, with disbursals happening within 30 minutes.
Similarly, the NBFC's access to data and its insightful analysis have allowed it to enter the mortgage business three years ago, which now has an AUM of over Rs 4,000 crore.
Under its SME loan offerings, Muthoot FinCorp also allows small business owners, such as shopkeepers, to repay their loans through the equated daily instalment mechanism, instead of the traditional EMI method.
This is largely done through tech intervention, as it has the data insights on its loan customers: their business type, cash flow position, and the loan amount they can avail.
“Our speed of delivery has improved, errors have come down, and overall customer experience has improved. The overall ticket size of loans has gone up,” the CEO says, on the impact of technology on the firm’s operations.
The NBFC has also partnered with various fintech startups, including PhonePe, BankBazaar, Bharat Pay, Paytm, where the latter has access to customers and the former provides the capital. “Fintechs have raised the bar and pushed us to do things faster. We have a mindset for partnering,” remarks Varghese.
Going forward, the CEO says the firm continuously aims to help common citizens by leveraging technology to create curated products that would bring them into the formal banking system.
“We would like to sharpen our product recommendation engine and create a marketplace for financial products to give a choice to our customers. The journey has just begun, and a lot more can be done,” Varghese says.
Edited by Suman Singh