It is hard, if not foolish, to deny that it is time for aggregators and online marketplaces to enable buying and selling in almost every sphere. The same is true for financial products as well such as loans.
There are plenty of options available such as banks, financial institutions and NBFCs for a lay borrower to go around, leading to a situation that closely resembles an embarrassment of riches.
Thereby, there has, undoubtedly, been a need to bring most of them, if not all, at one common platform and enable interoperability for the borrowers.
Gaurav Kumar, Founder and CEO of Yubi, speaks about this growing need and how the start-up he founded is making efforts to fill this gap.
In a telephonic interaction with MintGenie, he also shared his thoughts on the start-up ecosystem of India, challenges faced by the most rookie fintechs and how optimistic the future appears while the Indian economy pursues its grand mission of growing to a size of $5 trillion.
Edited Excerpts:
Can you tell us something about the past three years of journey of your start-up that began as CredAvenue in 2020 and now known as Yubi?
We process 50,000 loans in a day, effectively giving 24 million loans in one year. Last year, we processed close to 5.5 million, thus reporting a 5 times growth in one year.
What do you think about the start-up ecosystem in India?
We are a country which is headed towards 5 trillion economy. This growth will be fuelled by credit. So, new start-ups are coming and innovating on digital infrastructure.
But since the entry barrier is going down, it is becoming very challenging for the entire fintech space.
Do you also give loans on this platform? If not, what incentives does a borrower have to visit this platform?
We provide tech infrastructure to lenders to evaluate and lend to borrowers across the spectrum and products i.e., personal, home loan. But we don’t lend ourselves.
A borrower goes to an NBFC or fintech or bank which is integrated with Yubi that gives access to not only that bank but others as well. So, this platform enables borrowers to get access to all the banks, thereby offering interoperability of options.
This is your fourth start-up. What sort of challenges have you faced at Yubi which you didn’t face earlier?
The challenges that start-ups face largely remain the same. For the last 2-3 years, the challenge for a start-up lies in attracting a talent and retaining them especially in the tech space. There is a war on the best talent. This (right talent) is the company’s most important asset.
Afterall, tech is at the centre of everything from data science to AI, and because of that, key talent is very important.
Although compensation structure of big firms is also attractive but some (talented folks) still want to join start-ups because the learning curve is quite steep here. In a start-up, you can be a decision maker, and one also gets attractive stock option offers.
Tell us something about your entry in the fixed income space?
We want to introduce products in the fixed income space and are trying to take fixed income to retail customers. I believe that we will see a lot of depth in the fixed income secondary market soon.
