Datacultr to drive financial inclusion with ODYSSEY

Datacultr has announced the launch of its risk management solution – ODYSSEY targeted at the financing sector in the emerging world. With ODYSSEY, banks, consumer finance lending and Fintech companies can provide credit to underserved people, significantly reducing their risk and NPLs.

Billions of people across the globe lack access to cheap credit, required either for working capital or various life events like births, weddings and deaths or to protect against natural and man-made disasters. Financial inclusion of these people is critical. Lending small amounts to buy a smartphone is one of the innovative ways that consumer lending and fintech companies have identified, to bring such people into the fold of organized credit. Such loans help them build a user’s profile and their credit score, allowing larger amounts to be disbursed basis favourable scores. But such loans come with their fair share of challenges. For instance, the challenge with financing smartphones is that the lender doesn’t have any real control over the asset. ODYSSEY allows them to make this device into viable collateral, by providing NBFCs with an access point to such lent out devices.

Commenting on the same, Neel Juriasingani, CEO & Co-Founder, Datacultr, says, “Financial services providers are now beginning to innovate. Decade-old organizations are rethinking their operations and rebuilding them from the ground up to have an edge over the competitors. ODYSSEY helps NBFCs and fintech companies in educating their users, about Loans, EMIs, Credit Scores, how to build a healthy credit score to get access to cheaper credit and also device access to take relevant actions in certain cases where the users are unwilling to repay. This is very helpful while extending loans to the new-to-credit population. We believe it would benefit this population in two ways – the average amount of loans should go up and more people will start getting such loans.”

“Financial institutions, specifically in the business of financing smartphones, can remotely manage smartphones given out on installments/loan, by setting up a unique device experience and degradation module that can, if required, lock the device remotely, rendering the device useless till the EMI is repaid. Financial institutions that finance appliances and other consumer goods, can keep a track of these assets, and set up alerts for asset movements, that are unauthorized or suspect,” says Sujoy Ghosh, CTO & Co-Founder, Datacultr.