The era of fintech has truly arrived in India. In the last few years, the sector has gained a lot of traction with a slew of players emerging in payments, lending, insurance, and personal investments. While most of these are focused on either personal or SME financing, the promising segment of housing finance and mortgages remains undisrupted.
Square Capital, the digital lending marketplace arm of India’s real estate marketplace, Square Yards, has added to its market dominance by becoming the primary organised distributor of secured mortgages in the country. The company currently claims to facilitate INR 300 to 350 Crores (USD 50 million) of total loan disbursements every month, with home loans and loan against property contributing to around 75% of the overall volumes.
As India progresses in the direction of a digitally-enabled economy, a major part of lending and loan disbursal process will move online as well. The home loan mortgages business in India is ripe for disruption by fintech services marketplace like Square Capital that can handle the entire customer journey from search and discovery to fulfilment of loans.
Manage Your Rupee: Global Indian Solutions is the One-Stop Fintech Platform for Global Indians
The company plans to further fortify its technological and analytical capabilities to create an integrated paperless ecosystem for home loans using its strong partnerships with real-estate developers, banks, and NBFCs.
Square Capital was launched in 2016 with the aim of capturing the home loan business originating from Square Yards’ real estate transactions. Currently, Square Capital has tie-ups with more than 65 banking and NBFC partners, facilitating more than 800 loan transactions on a monthly basis.
Tanuj Shori, CEO and Founder of Square Yards said, “Housing finance dwarfs all other forms of retail lending by a big margin, but there is no serious fintech player attempting to simplify it through technology. We see a big gap in the market and an opportunity for ourselves to scale this business significantly. Facilitating a home loan mortgage transaction does not only require getting through the maze of complex valuation decisions, excessive documentation, and tight regulations but also deep expertise of the underlying real-estate value chain. No wonder only a real-estate player could have cracked this space and Square Yards is doing it with its mortgage arm, Square Capital, emerging as one of the largest integrated mortgage marketplaces in the country.”
Replicating its model in the real-estate world, the company follows a similar Online to Offline (O2O) approach for loans during customer acquisition and service delivery. It has unique online capabilities to provide accurate eligibility of an applicant linked to the credit bureau, various bank products, and credit policies. It also has the ability to perform e-KYC of clients through integration with NSDL and the Aadhar network and direct Integration with bank-loan origination systems. Its offline sales team provides loan advisory and fulfilment support in the lending process – managing client documentation, sanctions, and assisting the client till the entire lifecycle of loan disbursement.
P2P Lending Platform i2iFunding Receives RBI Nod
“In the absence of any national-level mortgage distributor that has managed to scale up over the last decade, Square Capital has not only been able to generate massive digital leads but is also enabling fulfilment, either digitally or through its hybrid O2O approach,” Shori added.
Looking to the future growth of the company, Square Capital plans to become the largest online financial matchmaking platform in India, aiming for comprehensive ecosystem growth, including customers, financial institutions, and influencers. The Square Capital technology team is currently working on an integrated tech platform to take the entire cycle of mortgage lending to an online platform which will include customer query, product policy check, credit decision making, online applications, integrated with the bank’s backend system and disbursal of loans.
Square Capital is a marketplace lending platform that aggregates offers from financial institutions on a single platform and provides end-to-end fulfilment support in the lending process, including assessing the credit worthiness/risk of clients, helping them choose the right product from the appropriate lending organisation, managing their documentation, advising on professional issues pertaining to taxation and insurance, and assisting the client in the entire lifecycle of loan disbursement.
