Exclusive Interview with Karan Mehta, Co-founder & CTO of Kissht

Kissht is a financial technology platform that enables instant, seamless credit for consumers to make purchases at digital points of sales. The company offers a hassle-free experience of shopping online as well as offline Merchant stores by offering quick and easy EMI at Point of Sale. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with the CTO of Kissht, Karan Mehta.

1.Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Kissht is a unique digitally-enabled platform with a vision to provide quick and hassle-free credit financing to its customers across India. We started our operations in 2015 and are currently headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. The company was founded by two IIT graduates, Ranvir Singh  (Founder and MD, Kissht)  and Krishnan Vishwanathan (Founder and CEO, Kissht) who have previously worked as the financial services leader at McKinsey and Co in building risk and credit management solutions and credit growth strategies for all major public and private sector banks across India and South East Asia. Karan Mehta, CTO, Kissht, has almost a decade of tech-focused expertise. A seasoned entrepreneur and an accomplished mind in the field of all things tech, he has a profound knowledge of AI, ML, and deep tech, successfully leveraging them to substantially improve businesses across India's fintech landscape.

We provide access to flexible credit to a large segment of India's young demographic who do not traditionally have access to it. Our products are 100% digital with zero paperwork and we offer instant credit check with loan disbursal in 5 minutes with zero human underwritings.

We are engaged in the business of merchant acquisition/tie-ups, and the development of credit gateway technology. We assess the customer's creditworthiness with the help of our proprietary software algorithm and credit marketplace platform for the provisioning of instant consumer loans. Our unique Kissht Score has led us to tap a relatively new market of customers that do not have a CIBIL score. Over just a few years, Kissht has taken both Purchase Financing Loans as well as Personal Loans in truly digital forms to every single nook and corner of India with a string of successful lending products. This includes the development of the hugely successful Cardless Credit product for Flipkart and the TripMoney product for MakeMyTrip. We also brought the concept of Buy-Now-Pay-Later to India in 2015 through our partnership with Caratlane.

Our constant efforts to financially empower our customers has helped us establish our presence across various business segments like instant cash, personal loan, consumer durable loans, as well as online shopping across more than 300+ affiliated partners like Amazon, Flipkart, Caratlane, Make My Trip, Uber and many more.

2. What mission and objectives were the company set up with? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

While working on retail credit in India, Mr. Ranvir Singh and Mr. Krishnan Vishwanathan realized that the facilities for granting small loans to the lower-income segment were extremely limited in the country. This was despite the better repayment capabilities of this segment. The reason behind this gap was that the traditional way of underwriting incurred high operating expenses and was paper-heavy. There was also the fundamental way of underwriting, which relied on advanced formal bank credit data. To cater to the low-income segment we needed data while taking an innovative approach towards operating expenses in a way that could help us create more opportunities. That is where we started with small-ticket retail credit.

We had set up Kissht with an intention to serve smaller ticket-sized loans to the credit-deprived segment in India, meaning the lower-income groups.  As a platform, we wanted to extend loans to these customers in a hassle-free, document less, dignified, and super quick manner. We have been successful in doing that to a great extent, received over 3 million loan applications, the majority from the underserved and unserved salaried and self-employed user segment, and successfully disbursed for over 2 million+ since our inception.

We aim to radically change the end-to-end customer experience of a borrower for their personal and professional growth. This will help young Indians in being financially independent and literate, thus revolutionizing the way banking is done for today's smartphone-wielding generation.

3.Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions towards the company and the industry.

Kissht is founded by Ranvir Singh, Founder, and Managing Director, along with Krishnan Vishwanathan, Founder, and CEO.

Ranvir Singh graduated from IIT Bombay in 2001 and later joined MAQ software. After a brief stint, he pursued post-graduation from IIM Bangalore to further hone his expertise in management. He later joined McKinsey & Company as an Associate Partner in 2005. In a large financial services role, his job dealt with retail credit, collection, and analytics. It was here that his passion for working with data and information was ignited as he foresaw their powerful role in financial services. The role also allowed him to work with leading financial institutions, banks, and new-age companies all over Asia. In 2015 he saw the opportunity for a digital lending platform that would bring together banks and customers on a more accessible platform. At Kissht, Ranvir, along with the board members and CEO, sets the long-term strategic roadmap and defines priorities for the company to increase the shareholder value and stay ahead of the competitive landscape.

An IIT Delhi graduate, Krishnan has worked in Bangalore, California, and Boston. With an interest in hardware engineering, Krishnan is a technophile with many patents to his name. After completing his MBA from Yale University in the US, he returned to India to join McKinsey & Company. Krishnan's grounding in financial services comes from his experience at McKinsey where he served 40+ institutions, banks, NBFCs, life insurance companies in India and South East Asia, specializing in retail financial services. Krishnan moved out of McKinsey in 2013 and went on to start a consulting company with Ranvir Singh, later founding Kissht in 2015-16. Krishnan's role at Kissht, along with the executive team includes taking key operational decisions to achieve the business objectives and continuously assess the adherence to the company's vision and mission.

4.What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

In the constantly evolving digital lending space, Kissht keeps itself abreast of all the technological innovations to bring the best possible solutions to our customers. We keep a singular and laser-sharp focus on ensuring completely digital, hassle-free, and instant access to credit. We have built a robust technological platform and leveraged it to ensure a brilliant customer experience while staying compliant with all regulatory requirements. Our cutting-edge technology platform manifests in the form of a very seamless customer journey along with a very powerful credit decision engine which leads to a great credit portfolio for the company. Kissht has put to use the power of every digital innovation in the form of India stack, mandates, eSign, UPI, and others. As a digital platform, our biggest USP is the way we have combined third-party data sources with a great analytics process to build and fine-tune our credit and fraud engine.

5.How do you plan to revolutionize the Indian market and what are your plans to tap the market?

Great innovations lead to revolutions.  We hope to revolutionize the Indian market by introducing some very innovative loan products such as Digital Group Loans and Omni Channel Buy Now Pay Later and few personalized credit-linked insurance products in the medium term. These products are expected to lead to a surge in the Kissht user base. We intend Kissht to be synonymous with easy access to credit as well as functionality across a large number of avenues for our customers to be able to make use of the credit that Kissht offers.

6.How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

The digital lending industry has gone through a formative period since the pandemic began. A dynamic shift can be witnessed in the requirement of real-time decision-making, digital KYC, and digital underwriting. Post-pandemic small businesses will need affordable loans to help them recover from the financial fallout of COVID-19. We are ready for the lending wave in terms of new applications as the economy looks to recover from the current global crisis. To summarize, the industry has the potential to make a difference in the country's recovery and rebuilding of a robust economy.

7.How has the adoption of digital lending in India evolved over the last few years?

The digital lending landscape in India has witnessed a phenomenal pace of change over the past few years.  Some of these trends included expansion outside traditional lending products, entry of new non-traditional players, and strategic partnerships. There is a perfect convergence of several factors in India – easy means to do KYC, access to smartphones and apps, rich digital footprint, streamlined bureau data, and most importantly, an aware and knowledgeable customer. This has led customers to embrace and adopt digital lending.

8.How is your company utilizing advanced analytics and big data?

Kissht has made use of analytics for credit and fraud engines since its inception. Our credit and fraud engines have been trained on the 15mn+ signup users as well as the 2mn+ loan-taking customers. The power of machine learning and sharp analytics has allowed us to greatly reduce our rejection rate while increasing our portfolio's credit quality. Our entire existence can be credited to the ability to correctly underwrite customers, whether or not they have a prior credit history.

In the past couple of years, big data, analytics, and machine learning have been leveraged for more and more tasks in the Kissht ecosystem – right from customizing the communication channels to determining the ideal frequency for each customer, identifying the customers who will require payment reminders, and in devising smart customer support queues to detect and route queries to very different channels.  These digital tools have also helped us leverage repeat transactions by identifying highly targeted products for existing customers. By smartly positioning these products, we have been able to retain customer attention and interest in a diversified portfolio.

9.The industry is seeing the rising importance of Big Data Analytics and AI. How do you see these emerging technologies impact the business sector?

Analytics and AI will significantly improve the experience and lower operational costs and credit risks. These will be the differentiating factors behind the success stories in this industry and will become table stakes for digital lending.

10.What is your Leadership Mantra?

Our mantra is   'Build the best product for the customers – Success will automatically follow'.