In an interesting conversation with Bfsinxt.com’s Kailash Shirodkar, Provenir’s Country Manager (India, Varun Bhalla talks about how BFSI and Fintech players can leverage and improvised their risk decisioning capabilities with help of enhancing their AI and ML capabilities. Edited Excerpts:
Q. What are the challenges faced by BFSi professionals, you have encountered in your conversations?
Three important challenges are – inability to access data, no centralized view of the data, and unable to utilize latest developments in AI/ML in these data sets.
We are seeing these set of challenges in India too, access to data in terms of availability at right time and part of journey. Does all of this data come at one point? These impacts implementation of machine learning models.
Q. What opportunities do you see?
Organizations are looking to prevent frauds and improve operational efficiency. In Indian context, I keep hearing there’s a big concern around fraud prevention piece. Most of the people here coming online are first time users and poses risk as they are disbursing to the customer for first time without ever meeting or process of knowing who they are, lenders are trying to leverage alternative data.
Q. How are you looking at the financial inclusion space with credit gap?
It is an interesting dynamics where at this point almost all lenders are trying to use alternate data to understand more about the risk profile of loan seekers. Data from mobile to bill payments, etc. helps build a profile and enables a lender to take decision. It becomes a critical point as we move towards credit invisibles.
Q. How has been you experience in Indian ecosystem?
The Indian fintech and banking community is one of the most innovative and fastest growing, solving for unbanked population, MSMEs and building innovative BNPL processes. In my course of interaction, I get to meet a lot of fellow professionals, some are at a young stage, some at much more advanced stage and at that point to build robust models and implement technology in making financial services access to everyone.
India is at the forefront of innovation as compared to other countries.
Q. What are three successful pillars for AI implementation?
Being scalable, robust system and people centric services help in building successful AI implementation
Q. What are the thoughts for digital lending businesses?
Digital lending models need to have all round data access, robust systems to scale up rapidly and differentiation capability and keeping consumer services at the heart of it.
