OCEN 4.0: Intro to Borrowers Agent Openhouse 10

📢Calling all loan agents keen to understand the OCEN 4.0 business opportunity. 🔑📈

OCEN 4.0  introduces a new and powerful role – the Borrowers Agent(BA). If you are looking to play a pivotal role in the MSME lending ecosystem without lending from your own balance sheet, this new role of a BA may be what you want to understand really well. 💡

The BA role is critical to the OCEN story. In this session, we deep-dive on what this role entails, why it is the linchpin of the OCEN 4.0 model, how BAs enable lenders to go remote, and how this role wields a lot of power. We also talk through how to get started, possible business models for BAs and what to focus on to be a successful Borrowers Agent. 🌟🚀🚀

OCEN Documentation: http://ocen.dev

❓Questions? Submit your questions here.
📩Contact? Reach the OCEN 4.0 team at [email protected]

Please note: The blog post is authored by our volunteers, Wribhu Tyagi and Aravind R.

OCEN 4.0 : Tech deep-dive Openhouse #9

📢👷🧑‍💻Calling all TSPs and participants eager to dive into OCEN 4.0 APIs. 

If you are wanting to understand the tech, the APIs and get started on building for OCEN 4.0, our second open house on OCEN 4.0 is here for you !! 💡

In this session, we do a deep-dive on the architecture, the loan journey on OCEN 4.0 components, the APIs in the OCEN spec and share how you can build for a participant by mocking the APIs of the other. 📝🔑🧑‍💻

OCEN Documentation: http://ocen.dev

❓Questions? Submit your questions here.
📩Contact? Reach the OCEN 4.0 team at [email protected]

Please note: The blog post is authored by our volunteers, Aravind R and Sagar Parikh.

Introducing OCEN 4.0: Transforming MSME Lending 🚀🚀

We’re thrilled to unveil OCEN 4.0, the latest advancement in our Open Credit Enablement Network protocol, revolutionizing cash flow-based MSME lending. 🌟

OCEN 4.0 represents a significant leap forward from our ongoing GeM SAHAY and GST SAHAY pilots. In this iteration, along with updated API specifications, we have also added the OCEN Registry, Product Network and rules, specialized participant roles and much more. All these features help us unlock cash-flow-based lending to match the scale, complexity and needs of Bharat. 🔑📈

Check out our introductory open house session on OCEN 4.0

🔍 More details? The API and documentation of OCEN 4.0 are publicly available at http://ocen.dev and will be updated with FAQs from the open house sessions.

🔮 What’s next? Yes, a lot is happening. We have more open house sessions coming out in the following weeks. We are also actively onboarding Wave 1 partners for OCEN 4.0.

❓Questions? Submit your questions here.
📩Contact? Reach the OCEN 4.0 team at [email protected]

Please note: The blog post is authored by our volunteers, Aravind R and Sagar Parikh.

38% of India’s Unicorns Are Not “Indian”

India currently has 90 unicorns – startup companies that are valued at over $1b – and will likely soon have 100 unicorns, becoming the third such country after the USA and China. Since January 2016 when the “Startup India” program was launched, the startup ecosystem of India including infrastructure for startups, be it incubators, mentorship, funding, corporate initiatives, media coverage, or even patent filing, has improved substantially making life easier for entrepreneurs. 

However, it is still not as smooth a ride for the Indian start-ups as it is for startups in the advanced economies of say, the USA, Singapore, and China. Our “ease of doing business” is yet to be on par with the developed world, especially given the high taxation, onerous compliance requirements, inadequate and cumbersome legal protection of IP, as well as time-consuming and expensive processes to access capital and secure exits. It isn’t a surprise therefore that many companies are shifting their primary legal location to foreign jurisdictions like the USA, and Singapore. 

How do the numbers stand?

As per a study by Venture Intelligence, of the presently known 90 “Indian” unicorns), 56 are based in India, 25 in the USA, 8 in Singapore, and 1 in the Netherlands spanning sectors from e-Commerce to fintech to gaming and more. In other words,  38% of “Indian” unicorns are not quite Indian as they are domiciled outside of India. Moreover, these 34 unicorns have raised approximately $30B ie, this large money could have been but hasn’t been invested into an India domiciled entity. 

Sector Wise break-up of the Unicorns 

Source: Venture Intelligence

Chart: Sector-wise domicile of unicorns as on 31st March 2022.

The reasons for incorporating in the USA are different from incorporating in say,  Singapore. SaaS founders find it easier to reach out to the large market for SaaS “Software as a Service” based offerings in the USA by incorporating there. Companies incorporated in Singapore for high “ease of doing business”, low taxation, quality infrastructure, and quality of life while remaining close to India.  

Out of 12 Indian unicorns in the SaaS category, all except Zoho and Darwinbox are based in the USA. SaaS offerings are expected to be a $1 trillion opportunity and India will lose wealth creation, tax revenues, listing, and related income, by not having these companies domiciled in India. 

Of the three unicorns in a frontier technology area like Artificial Intelligence, namely – Glance, Fractal, and Mindtickle, one is registered in Singapore while the other two are in the USA. Of the 3 unicorns in Gaming, Mobile Premier League and  Dream 11 are based in Singapore and New Jersey respectively while Games 24×7 is registered in India. 

Flipkart, India’s greatest startup success story and the poster boy for Indian e-commerce, which was acquired by Walmart at a valuation of over $20B, was domiciled in Singapore.  That set the trend of e-commerce companies having their HQs in the island country. There are many Singapore shell companies set up by VC funds to become holding companies for Indian subsidiaries. Singapore is today the hottest destination for the registration of Indian e-commerce players.

Even more worrying than this trend of registering the parent company outside India is the migration of startup founders to UAE and Singapore.  Lower taxes, easier access to capital, government support, simple compliance, and better quality of life while being just a short flight away from India make the UAE and Singapore rather attractive to founders. 

Whichever country our startups chose to register or our founders chose to migrate to, the ultimate loser is India with intellectual property ownership and funds being vested in non-Indian jurisdictions. 

Stay in India Mission

In order to retain the economic value added by the start-up ecosystem, it is important that India urgently puts in place policies that ensure that founders and startups ‘Stay-in-India”.  This will require the coming together of various ministries, particularly DPIIT/Min of Commerce, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and regulators like the Reserve Bank of India and Securities and Exchange Board of India to address the Stay-in-India Checklist. 

Stay-in-India is an evolving checklist of issues that need to be solved to contain the exodus of startups from India. These issues fall under four categories: a) Ease of doing business and making it easy to raise funds; b) harmonization of coding of digital economy c) Reducing overall tax anomalies and d) Increased DTA and foreign markets access. 

The issues are comprehensively listed in the Stay-in-India checklist

As an example, let’s consider the anomalies in the taxation of dividends. Dividend received from overseas subsidiaries, that has been already taxed, is taxed once again in India as income in the hands of the company. Also, while the rate of tax on such dividends for certain companies is 15% (as against 30%), the same exemption is not provided to limited-liability partnerships and individuals. It amounts to double taxation of income and discourages a model where overseas subsidiaries of Indian startups can pay dividends at lower tax rates to Indian shareholders. Removal of this dividend tax will directly encourage start-ups to remain domiciled in India and receive dividend income from subsidiaries abroad. 

Similarly, there are regulatory frictions e.g. TDS on the sale of software products which reduces the working capital in hands of Software product companies, or the need for filling the Softex form (which was relevant in the early days of IT services exports), and which is now redundant as GSTN Invoices already have the required and sufficient data. All that is required is for different departments of the Govt and regulators to connect digitally and share information. The unfavourable tax regime for IPR protection, such as subjection to minimum alternate tax, IPRs being subject to income tax, and not capital gains even when they are held for more than a year is another big irritant. Technology-heavy startups, therefore, tend to relocate to jurisdictions like Singapore and the USA that have a smoother and lower-cost approach. Founders relocating to overseas jurisdictions are typically seen around the time of M&A. One of the reasons relates to taxation: typically, a portion of the financial proceeds arising from an M&A transaction is held in escrow and released to the founders after some time and/or completion of certain contractual obligations. The escrow payments are treated as income by the Indian tax authorities rather than capital gains as other jurisdictions do – this needs resolution.

India is emerging as a global startup hub, with the support of the Govt, with our startups attracting capital and talent while being at the forefront of innovation, jobs, wealth, and intellectual property creation. Brand India is enhanced globally by the success of Indian startups.  With more support from the Government by way of removal of regulatory friction and by providing incentives – fiscal and regulatory –  the ecosystem required to create, enable and grow Indian startups will dramatically accelerate. 

The Ease of Doing Business must be tackled in mission mode with the Stay-in-India Mission (SIIM) being an integral part of India is to secure its rightful place around the global innovation table. 

The blog post is co-authored by our volunteers Sanjay Anandram and Amit Agrahari. You can reach out to Amit at [email protected]


Disclaimer: The article depends upon various pubic data sources apart from credible data sources that are relevant at the current date and time. Readers may like to read this accordingly. 

Data Sources Courtesy: 1. Venture Intelligence. 2. Invest India

Can digital currencies and crypto investors help close India’s SME financing gap?

The internet connected the average Indian to millions of sources of information. Could crypto protocols connect Indians to millions of sources of capital?

To achieve its goal of a five trillion dollar economy by 2025, India needs to close an enormous financing gap for its small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). It already has important assets with which to attract global capital: the youth of its population, the energy of its tech sector, the growth of its internet connectivity, and the rising acceptance of so-called informational collateral in lieu of traditional physical collateral. But what hasn’t yet been done is to integrate these assets into the new multi-trillion dollar cryptoeconomy, which may have the most risk-tolerant, internationally oriented, growth-seeking pool of investors in the world.

In this piece we begin by reviewing India’s need for SME and startup capital. We then tick through India’s existing assets, with particular focus on informational collateral, which combines the previously separate concepts of due diligence and physical collateral into an internet-friendly financing package. Finally, we discuss why global crypto investors could help meet India’s capital needs.

India’s need for SME and startup financing

India is home to more than 60 million businesses, 10 million of which have unique GST registration numbers, most of them SMEs. However, of the one trillion USD worth of total commercial lending exposure of the banking system, only ~25% of it is provided to SMEs, which are considered less creditworthy than larger corporates or multinationals. This has resulted in a financing gap estimated to be between 250-500 billion USD, where meritorious businesses without national profiles aren’t able to access the capital they need to finance their growth. India’s next trillion in GDP growth depends upon solving this problem, but the incumbent financial system may not have the resources to fix it alone. Despite ever-increasing bank branches, India’s legacy financial system is still slow, costly, and unwieldy for borrowers— in sharp contrast to the databases, online KYC systems and intelligent lending apps of new-age fintech companies. And in addition to this high cost of capital for MSMEs, India also has a low baseline level of financial inclusion.

The baseline issue is being partially addressed with low-frill Jan Dhan accounts, which are providing partial banking support for millions of previously excluded individuals. Many of these Jan Dhan accounts are held by small businesses, entrepreneurs, students and self-employed people in rural India, the same folks who are running India’s SMEs. But these accounts have only inflow data, with outflows typically in cash. Even though cash still plays a big role in the self-organized and informal sectors, it’s not easy to provide business-related financing in cash. The so-called JAM trinity (Jan Dhan accounts, Aadhaar digital identities, and Mobile phones) offers a partial solution for this under-banked population, but it only supports what we might think of as consumer-grade applications like basic peer-to-peer payments and individual savings accounts. Access to capital sufficient to finance a business — a true measure of financial inclusion — is still not yet present for these low-income, mostly feature-phone possessing groups.

On the other end of the spectrum from rural SMEs are India’s tech startups. Over the last decade, India has broken into the ranks of global technology and is now the #3 generator of unicorns in the world. Supportive governmental policies, combined with a young, creative, and aspirational workforce has helped reimagine large swathes of the economy including diverse industries such as e-commerce, logistics, SAAS, education, food, healthcare etc. This rise has attracted global equity and loan-funds that could in turn help many start-ups become world beating players in their respective domains. But the startup sector is just as hungry for capital as the rural SMEs, and India’s startup economy is still somewhat disconnected from global venture capitalists and financial markets.

India’s assets: youth, growth, connectivity, and informational collateral

India does have assets with which to close the capital gap. It has a youthful population. It has a fast-growing economy, even given the setbacks of COVID-19. It has an enormous population of hundreds of millions of new internet users. And it has something new, which is the possibility of informational collateral as a sort of combination of traditional concepts of due diligence and physical collateral.

Specifically, the SME funding gap is most pressing for the Indian cash-flow businesses that don’t have the physical assets to take out loans, which are the mainstay of the current, hard-collateral-backed credit system.

One alternative is to use trustworthy digital records to ascertain whether a business is worthy of credit or equity investment. India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) helps to address this by generating invoice and payment data in a format suitable for credit underwriting and risk analysis. The GST data also enables a small enterprise in a large value system to provide data and visibility across the supply chain; for example, one can track the progress of parts from a small parts supplier to an auto component manufacturer to a large passenger car maker all the way through to distributors, sub-dealers, and retail sales.

The digital version of an SME’s sales and purchase invoices ledger thus amounts to informational collateral on both the company and the larger ecosystem within which it sits, that could become the basis for extending credit, as an alternative to the hard asset or collateral-based financial system. This is similar to how Square Capital and Stripe Capital already function in the West.

In addition to credit-based financing, the trustworthy records furnished by GST’s informational collateral can also support equity or quasi-equity financing, to support growth without increasing debt. These might take the form of direct equity investments in small businesses, or even personal micro-equity investments in individual consultants or students. 

India’s innovation: use new pools of crypto capital to address long-standing financing needs

So, we understand that (a) Indian SMEs need capital, and that (b) IndiaStack’s UPI and Aadhaar can help GST generate informational collateral for potential investors and lenders.


Now the question arises: what class of investors is most willing to use this newfangled type of informational collateral to invest in potentially high-risk businesses outside of the proven venues of America, Europe, East Asia and the large Indian enterprises? Who are the most risk-tolerant, international, forward-looking, class of investors in the world — willing to risk millions of dollars purely on the basis of internet diligence alone?

It may turn out to be the new class of wealthy, globally-minded crypto investors. After all, the 10-year old cryptoeconomy is now worth trillions of dollars, there are more than a hundred million crypto holders around the world, and there are at least fifty crypto protocols valued over one billion dollars, a “unicoin” analog to the traditional tech unicorn. While still small in comparison to global capital markets, a sector worth $2T that is growing at more than 100% per annum could become a much larger piece of the global financial puzzle in short order. This is a new source of risk-tolerant digital capital that could flow into India to help close the SME financing gap, if we can make it an attractive proposition for the global investor.

Specifically, India could offer a viable path to deploy this new crypto wealth in a controlled manner, while solving for SME financial inclusion. Inflows of cryptocurrencies from KYC-ed investors through approved Indian and global exchanges can potentially be allowed into India for the purposes of enhancing SME access to low-cost global capital. GST-registered companies could, for instance, receive capital against their issued e-invoices and other information collateral in special accounts opened via a controlled conduit such as GIFT city, which is one of India’s favored bridges to international markets. The companies benefiting will need to explicitly consent to sharing their information and receiving funds into a new account at system-level while capturing cash flows against invoices for repayment. Inflows of global crypto-capital into Indian SMEs could also enable the rest of the credit system to migrate to informational collateral-based lending. And the special account could eventually be ported to a wallet backed by a national digital currency, such as the proposed digital rupee.

For more detail on this possibility, we invite your attention to Balaji S. Srinivasan’s companion piece on the subject, where he proposes to Add Crypto To IndiaStack. Balaji makes the case for crypto-powered extension of IndiaStack, which broadens IndiaStack from its current mostly domestic remit into an international platform for attracting capital from around the world. He describes several case studies by which the emerging world of decentralized finance or “defi” could help enrich the Indian economy, without competing with the digital rupee. For example, Indian startups could benefit from crypto crowdfunding, Indian SMEs as discussed could access global defi lending pools, and Indian students might even be funded with the emerging concept of personal tokens, like an equity-based version of microfinance. As the former CTO of  Coinbase, the $100B crypto goliath, and a former General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the $16B venture capital firm, Balaji’s proposals have technical and social support from the very class of investors we’d seek to attract. At least insofar as they relate to the issue of plugging the SME financing gap, we believe they deserve serious consideration by policymakers in India. 

In short, India has a unique opportunity to close the SME financing gap by attracting the new class of global crypto investors, by using everything the IndiaStack team has helped build over the last decade — particularly UPI, Aadhaar, GST, and the informational collateral they generate —  to help connect the trillion-dollar cryptoeconomy to capital-hungry Indian entrepreneurs.


The blog post is co-authored by Sanjay Phadke, Krishna V Iyer, Pankaj Gupta, Sanjay Jain, Sharad Sharma and Siddharth Shetty.

For any further queries, please write to [email protected]

iSPIRT’s Official Response to Non-Personal Data Governance Framework

A Committee of Experts under the Chairmanship of Shri. Kris Gopalakrishnan has been constituted vide OM No. 24(4)2019- CLES on 13.09.2019 to deliberate on Non-Personal Data Governance Framework. Based on the public feedback/suggestions, the Expert Committee has revised its earlier report and a revised draft report (V2) has been prepared for the second round of public feedback/suggestions. iSPIRT had provided a past response to the previous report and in this blog post contains a response to the revised report

At the iSPIRT Foundation, our view on data laws stems from the following fundamental beliefs: 

  1. Merits of a data democracy (that is, the user must be in charge)
  2. Competitive effects must be well understood, for creation of a level playing field amongst all Indian companies, and some ring-fencing must exist to protect against global data monopolies
  3. Careful design enables both high compliance and high convenience

It is with these perspectives that we have analyzed the revised Non-Personal Data report in our response.

Key Sources of Ambiguity in the NPD Report 

The key sources of ambiguity in the report are: 

  1. Purpose of techo-legal framework for Non Personal Data: The non personal data framework is meant to provide the right legal and technology foundations for world class artificial intelligence to be created out of India for the betterment of financial, health, and other socio-economically important services. The current version of the report sidesteps this completely by constraining the applicability to only “public good” purposes rather than taking a holistic approach to “business & public good purposes” 
  2. Data Business entities need a harmonised definition (given the interplay with data fiduciaries as proposed in the MeitY Personal Data Protection Bill) and clear incentives for participation. The current report relies excessively on regulation & processes for data businesses to achieve the outcome. 
  3. Institutional structure for Data Trustees: The report restricts Data Trustees to government agencies and non-profit organisations; however, in a domain consisting of fast evolving technology by excluding the private sector in offering the base infrastructure creates a severe limitation on the ecosystem of modellers that can be created. 
  4. Technology Architecture: The illustrated technology architecture is unclear around the public infrastructure (through the form of open standards, public platforms, and others) that need to be created & adopted to bring to life the non-personal data ecosystem in an accelerated manner. 

Conclusion

While we’re aligned with the vision of the committee, it’s critical that the above ambiguities are resolved in order to create a strong non-personal data ecosystem created in India. Till these ambiguities are resolved, the recommendations of the Report should not be operationalized.


For any press or further queries, please drop us an email at [email protected]

IGP (Innovative Growth Platform): The Capital Enabler

Two Cs are extremely critical for startups: Capital and Customers. In India, with a population of 1.3B, customers for B2C or B2B2C startups is not an issue. For B2B startups, although the market in India is promising, global markets are still very important.  Capital on the other hand is trickier. The total capital raised by startups India from 2010-2020 is around $100B. In the same period, startups in China have raised 4x and startups in the US have raised 10x the capital raised by startups in India. India needs to have a stronger mechanism to enable more Capital. There is a need to increase Capital availability in India.

IGP platform proposed by SEBI is a very refreshing initiative that aims to address the Capital issue. It provides another great avenue for startups looking to raise series B and beyond. This platform can double the available capital over the next 5 years. It addresses a key pain point of Capital availability for startups raising between INR 70 to INR 200 Cr. There is a chasm in this space- there are early-stage VC funds and there are PE funds for growth companies. However, there is not enough growth stage VC funds in India to fill this gap. IGP has the potential to be the platform to bridge this void.

The design of IGP has been very thoughtful with the key focus is on technology startups. The precursor to IGP was ITP (Institutional Trading Platform). Due to various reasons including the maturity of the startup ecosystem, the response to this platform was tepid. IGP addresses a few key pitfalls of ITP.

IGP restricts the listing to technology-focused companies with a proven Product-Market Fit and entering its growth phase. The revenue of the companies listing on this platform is expected to exceed INR 50 Cr. This will greatly help in mitigating the risk of listing by ensuring a good understanding of Product-Market Fit beforehand.

The governance issues are well balanced – protects the investor interests but at the same time provides enough flexibility for the founders to have control over strategy and execution. The companies listing on this platform cannot be burdened with the same rules of the public markets as they need to be very nimble. A balance between taking risks and moving fast with financial discipline as against governance practices such as quarterly reporting and stability is advised.

As in the case of investments in Alternative Investment Fund, the platform is selective about its investors. The companies listing on this platform need to operate as startups and not as mature companies. The risks are much greater with these companies and hence it is very critical to have investors who understand these risks and who can understand these nuances. 

M&As have been a key hurdle for startups in India. This is one of the key reasons for companies opting to flip. The platform is designed to simplify the process of M&As, post-listing. Simplifying the M&A process encourages corporates and PEs to participate on the platform. However, this spirit should be maintained in the implementation of the platform as well.  This is one of the critical success factors for the platform.

For the Indian startup ecosystem to become one of the major contributors to the economy, key policy changes are needed. IGP is one such platform that has the promise to increase capital availability significantly.  IGP has the added advantage of enabling exits for early stage investors. This increases the liquidity in the market that will further spur the startup ecosystem- a much needed virtuous cycle.

NASDAQ encouraged and enabled technology startups to list because of its adaptability and easier listing and governance guidelines. This accelerated technology startups in the US. IGP has the potential to be that platform in India. India can build products for the world and has the potential to be startup capital, but it needs a perfect storm of- Capital, Liquidity, Policy, Customers, and Entrepreneurs. IGP certainly has the promise to address the Capital and Liquidity aspects. Most importantly it enables Indian startups to stay in India!

iSPIRT Fourth Open House on OCEN: Market Opportunities

On 14th August we hosted the fourth open house session on Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN). This week’s discussion focused on the different roles and market opportunities for ecosystem participants across the lending value chain.

To recap, OCEN (O-Ken) is a new paradigm for credit that seeks to provide a common language for lenders and marketplaces to build innovative, financial credit products at scale.

In last week’s session, we did a deep dive into the underlying OCEN API flows, covering different entity interactions in-depth and addressing common technical queries. 

We began by highlighting the shift from balance sheet based lending to cash flow based lending that will be enabled by OCEN adoption. This upgraded methodology gives lenders a more holistic way to assess the creditworthiness of potential borrowers while allowing for more innovation in the kinds of products that can be offered to individuals and MSMEs.

OCEN is built around the idea that any service provider that interfaces with consumers and MSMEs can become a Fintech-enabled credit marketplace i.e. a Loan Service Provider. A key component to the success of this approach is that data from these digital platforms will reduce the information asymmetry between borrower and lender

There is room for entities to play the role of Derived Data Providers by digesting this data (after obtaining user consent) and helping to inform the lender’s credit rules. Working alongside specialised Underwriting Modellers, these players can map the best the fit between lender and borrower, making for smarter underwriting. 

OCEN is designed to enable many types of LSPs offering diverse ‘species’ of credit products. While the last three sessions have focused on MSME credit, this week our volunteers covered several use cases for individual consumers and service professionals. Principally these resemble the ‘Type 4’ loan products highlighted in earlier sessions where the end use for the loan is defined, and the repayment is locked into incoming cash flows.

Through the past few weeks one of our objectives has been to illuminate the range of opportunities for participants (both new and incumbent) to get involved in an OCEN-enabled lending process. Entities can provide value by bringing superior distribution, data, technology, or capital into the equation. 

LSPs have an important role to play as ‘agents of the borrower’. Technology Service Providers (TSP) need to work with lenders, LSPs or both, helping them to successfully come onboard the OCEN protocol. Account Aggregators play the role of data fiduciaries, facilitating the consented sharing of financial information in real time. Payment Service Providers (PSP) provide a ready infrastructure for both the disbursement of loans and collection of repayments.

Even incumbent fintech lending marketplaces that have a ‘deep, tacit know-how of the lending domain’ can play multiple roles in the cash flow based lending value chain.

Finally, our volunteers talked about CredAll, which is a collective of lending ecosystem players to drive cash flow based lending. Participants interested in becoming an OCEN-enabled Lender or LSP can have a look through the suggested checklist and basic requirements for each.

The fourth session on OCEN covered the following topics broadly, and the entire webinar is also available on our official Youtube channel:

  • By Siddharth Shetty
    • An introduction to iSPIRT and our values
  • By Nipun Kohli
    • New cash flow based lending paradigm
    • Derived data providers
    • How DDPs and Underwriting Modellers can help assess the creditworthiness of potential borrowers
    • Types of lending products enabled by OCEN
    • Product example 1 (Consumer finance use cases like paying school fees or streaming charges)
    • Product example 2 (For service professionals)
  • By Ankit Singh
    • Opportunities for different stakeholders at various stages in the credit lifecycle
    • Different ways entities can add value
    • How an LSP is different from a DSA
    • 5 D’s of value addition for LSPs
    • The role of Technical Service Providers (TSP), Account Aggregators (AA), and Payment Services Providers (PSP)
    • OCEN opportunity for incumbent fintech lending players
    • How to become an OCEN-enabled lender or LSP

After the presentation, our volunteers answered some questions from the community including:

  • How to think about constructing the right business models for LSPs and lenders?
  • Does a DDP always have to be an LSP?
  • What are the opportunities for existing fintech players?
  • What are the KYC implications for OCEN?

As always, in order to successfully create a new credit ecosystem for Bharat it will take the collaborative effort of participants from every corner of our fintech ecosystem.

If you’re interested in participating as a:

  • Loan Service Provider
  • Lender
  • Technology Service Provider

please drop us an email at [email protected]

Readers may also submit any questions about the OCEN to the same email address and our anchor volunteers shall try their best to answer these questions during next open house discussion (P.S: Time and Date is yet to be decided)

If you would like to know more about becoming an LSP, please check out www.credall.org (CredAll is a collective of lending ecosystem players to drive cash flow based lending)

Recommended Reading:

Chapter 7 and 8 in RBI UK Sinha MSME committee report: https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/PublicationReportDetails.aspx?UrlPage=&ID=924

Introduction to India Stack’s fourth layer – Data Empowerment & Protection Architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW__azI8_ow

iSPIRT First Open House on OCEN: Summary and Next Steps

“The ‘Landline to Mobile’ leapfrog for MSME credit is here.”

On Friday evening we hosted the first open house discussion on the new Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN). It is the next chapter of the ‘India Stack’ story, one that has provided the building blocks for public digital infrastructure in our country.

The past decade has seen us widen the net for financial inclusion in India on the back of open infrastructure for digital identity (Aadhaar, eKYC, eSign) and payments (UPI, AEPS). This year will also see the launch of the Account Aggregator framework, ushering in a new era for data governance in India. Similarly, OCEN is a new paradigm for credit that seeks to provide a common language for lenders and marketplaces to build innovative, financial credit products at scale.

The first session on OCEN covered the following topics broadly

  • By Sharad Sharma
    • An introduction to iSPIRT and our values
    • An overview of India Stack and where OCEN fits in
  • By Siddharth Shetty
    • A product demo of Sahay, the reference app for OCEN
  • By Ankit Singh
    • The reason for the credit gap in India
    • The challenges for lenders and prospective credit marketplaces
    • A reimagined credit ecosystem with OCEN and Loan Service Providers (LSPs)
    • The roles of LSPs
    • A new cash flow-based lending paradigm
    • The opportunity for market participants with OCEN
    • Release of OCEN APIs, Check them on Github: https://github.com/iSPIRT/lsp-lender-protocol-specification
  • Brief Q/A – Nipun Kohli

Why do we need this?

Access to credit is a crucial part of any flourishing economy. It is safe to say that India’s economic engine has not yet gotten out of second gear because of our inability to guide formal credit into the hands of the people and businesses that need it most. The unit economics of our current lending set-up are broken, and don’t suit the needs of either borrowers or lenders. The challenges range from high costs of customer discovery to lack of trustworthy data for underwriting, and an overall mismatch in ticket size, tenure and interest rates of loans. This has resulted in a whopping MSME credit gap of over $330 bn.

OCEN is an effort to recognise that the touchpoints for delivering financial products to individuals and MSMEs extends beyond traditional lenders. In order to democratize access to credit in India, OCEN reimagines an ecosystem where every service provider can become a Fintech-enabled credit marketplace. 

This means that whether you’re an aggregator, a payment gateway, a software provider or any other company that interfaces with consumers, you can now fill in a crucial role in India’s lending value chain. OCEN will allow you to effectively ‘plug in’ lending capabilities into your existing product or service offerings, enabling you to play the role of a Loan Service Provider (LSP) in this framework.

At one end this will simplify and reduce the cost of acquiring and analysing new customers. Working in tandem with the Account Aggregator framework it will also allow applicants to leverage different data sources so that lending can become a Cash flow based operation instead of the existing balance sheet focus. Overall these open standards will enable lenders to accelerate the disbursal of formal credit while allowing LSPs to holistically serve their existing customers.

India’s new credit rails are ready to be laid out, and we look forward to working with our spirited fintech ecosystem participants over the coming months.

We will be hosting weekly open house sessions to keep diving deeper into OCEN. The next session will focus on Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN) APIs at 5 pm IST on 31st July 2020.

Readers who wish to learn more about OCEN are encouraged to share this blog post and sign up again for the session here: https://bit.ly/LSPOpenHouse (same embedded below)

As always, in order to successfully create a new credit ecosystem for Bharat  it will take the collaborative effort of participants from every corner of our fintech ecosystem.

If you’re interested in participating as a:

  • Loan Service Provider
  • Lender
  • Technology Service Provider

please drop us an email at [email protected]

Readers may also submit any questions about OCEN on the google form: https://bit.ly/LSPQA. We shall do our best to answer these questions during next Friday’s open house discussion.

About the Author: The post is authored by our volunteer Rahul Sanghi.

Recommended Reading

Chapter 7 and 8 in RBI UK Sinha MSME committee report: https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/PublicationReportDetails.aspx?UrlPage=&ID=924

Introduction to India Stack’s fourth layer – Data Empowerment & Protection Architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW__azI8_ow

Covid19 Crisis: Sharpen the Saw with Marginal Costing

When reality changes, it’s important for the firms to acknowledge and adjust to the new situation. This is the time to remember the mantra ‘Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity, Cash is Reality’.

The Covid-19 crisis is much written about, debated and analyzed. If there is one thing everyone can agree about on the future, it is that there is no spoiler out there for this suspense. The fact is that no one knows the eventual shape of the business environment after the pandemic ends. 

When revenue momentum slows down or even hits a wall as it is happening in the current scenario, costs take centre stage even as every dollar of revenue becomes even more valuable for the firms. So, enterprises need an arsenal of strategic weapons to operate and survive, maybe even thrive, in this period of dramatic uncertainty. The same old-same old, push-push methods will not move the needle of performance. 

As an entrepreneur and CEO, I have always found the theory of Marginal Costing (MC) to be practically powerful over the years. Let me tell you why.

At the best of times, MC is a useful tool for strategic and transactional decision making. In a downturn or a crisis, it is vital for entrepreneurs and business leaders to look at their businesses through the MC filter to uncover actionable insights.

Using MC-based pricing, the firm can retain valuable clients, win new deals against the competition, increase market share in a shrinking market and enhance goodwill by demonstrating dynamism in downmarket.

As the firm continues to price its products based on MC, the idea is to continually attempt to increase the price to cover the fixed costs and get above the Break-Even Point (BEP) to profitability. However, this happens opportunistically and with an improving environment. 

Pricing for outcomes is more critical during these times and playing around with your costing models can go a long way in determining the most optimal outcome-based pricing approaches. 

Steps to Get the Best Out of MC:

1. Determine bare minimum Operating level

Estimate the bare minimum operating level or fixed costs you will need to bear to stay afloat and capitalize on revenue opportunities. This is the BEP of the business. This estimate can include:

  • Facilities, machines, materials, people and overheads. 
  • All R&D expenses required to support product development
  • Necessary support staff for deployment and maintenance of products/services.

2.  Ascertain the variable costs

Identify the incremental costs involved in delivering your business solutions to fulfil contractual and reputational expectations to both existing and new customers. These costs are the variable costs in your business model. Try to maximize capacity to flexibly hire, partner or rent variable costs as needed, based on incremental revenues.

3. Distinguish between fixed costs and transactional variable costs.

Take your fixed costs at your operating level as costs for a full P&L period. Let’s say, the fiscal year. Take your variable costs as what it takes to fulfil the Revenues that you can book. Make sure you only take the direct, variable costs. Note that if Revenues less Variable costs to fulfil the revenues is zero, then you are operating at MC.

4. Sweat the IP already created.

For every rupee or dollar you earn over and above the MC, you are now contributing to absorbing the fixed costs. Do bear in mind that all historical costs of building the IP are ‘sunk’, typically to be amortized over a reasonable period. Hence, it doesn’t figure in the current level of fixed costs. The idea now is to ‘sweat’ the IP already created. 

5. Peg the base price at marginal cost.

Start at the level of marginal cost, not fully absorbed costs. Then, try and increase the price to absorb more and more of the fixed costs. The goal is to get to BEP and beyond during the full P&L period. At the deal level, be wary of pricing based on the fully-loaded costs (variable and fixed costs, direct and indirect).

6. Close the deal to maximize cash flows

Price your product at marginal cost + whatever the client or market will bear to get the maximum possible advance or time-linked payments. This is a simple exchange of cash for margins wherever possible and an effective way to maximize the cash flows. Many clients, especially the larger ones, worry more about budgets than cash flow. 

Let’s look at a high-level illustration. 

Assume a software product company providing a learning and development platform to the enterprise marketplace. Let’s call this company Elldee.

Elldee has a SaaS business model that works well in terms of annuity revenues, steady cash flows and scale. Clients prefer the pay-as-you-model representing OpEx rather than CapEx. Investors love the SaaS space and have funded the company based on the future expectations of rapid scale and profitability.

However, given the ongoing crisis condition, Elldee needs to take a good re-look at the licensing model. By applying MC filters, it may make more market and financial sense to maximize upfront cash by doing a longer-term `licensing’ deal for the software-as-a-service at even a deep discount, with back-ended increments in price. The variable costs of on-boarding a client are similar to a SaaS deal yet the revenue converts to contribution to absorb fixed costs quickly to help survival and longer runway for future growth. So the client pays lesser than what they would have for a three year SaaS deal but Elldee is able to sweat its IP while maximizing cash flows.

Elldee can even move its existing SaaS clients to this model to capture more revenues upfront by being aware of MC and figuring out the right pricing models to get to the BEP of the business or product. Outcome-based pricing can also be designed to deliver margins beyond the MC, contributing to the absorption of fixed costs more aggressively.

Elldee is now in a position to address different types of markets, clients and alliances. It can calibrate higher and higher margins as the environment improves and client relationships deepen. Over the next two years, Elldee would come out stronger with a more loyal client base, higher market share and a growth trajectory aligned with its pre-Covid19 business plans.

Yes, this is a simplified example but many variations to the theme can be crafted, based on a firm’s unique context.

Remember that a strong tide lifts all boats but a downturn separates the men from the boys. Marginal costing techniques, when customized for sector-specific operating models, delivers a competitive edge at a time from which will emerge stronger winners and weaker losers. Be a winner.

About the contributor: Sam Iyengar is a PE investor, mentor and advisor focused on Innovation and Impact. He can be reached at [email protected].

iSPIRT Open House Sessions on NHS: Summary & Next Steps

Yesterday afternoon, we hosted our first Open House Session in partnership with Swasth Alliance on the National Health Stack (NHS). For those unfamiliar with this infrastructure, it is helpful to picture the NHS as a multi-layer cake designed to elevate the capacity of the Indian healthcare ecosystem.

At the base layer is a set of generic building blocks. These building blocks, which include bank accounts, digital identities, and mobile numbers, form the basic rails needed to identify, transact with, and communicate with individuals and businesses. Many components of IndiaStack – such as eSign and DigiLocker – leverage and augment these building blocks. 

The next layer of the NHS is the ‘plumbing layer’. This layer contains fundamental pillars needed to enable simple, intelligent, and secure healthcare solutions. The three main pillars of the NHS plumbing layer are electronic registries, a personal health record framework, and a claims engine. A brief summary of these pillars is provided below:

  1. Electronic Registries: these registries  allow for efficient discovery and authentication of doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare providers
  2. Personal Health Records System (PHR): a system that allows individuals to enjoy a longitudinal view of all their healthcare data and exercise granular control over how this data is stored and accessed
  3. Claims Engine: a software engine that reduces the cost of processing insurance claims, enabling insurers to cover more kinds of healthcare procedures, such as preventive checkups, walk-in consultations, and other low-cost but high-value procedures that are currently excluded from Indian insurance policies

The third layer of the NHS is an augmentation layer which is intended to utilize the three pillars of the NHS to bring greater efficiency to the Indian healthcare ecosystem. The doctor: patient ratio in this country is relatively low, and cannot be changed overnight.

Having said that, increasing the efficiency of each doctor would have a similar effect to increasing this doctor: patient ratio. The augmentation layer of the NHS is designed to drive up doctor efficiency through the use of technology. Examples of this kind of technology could include a matching engine to pair patients with the most relevant doctor, or a system to help doctors securely and remotely monitor the bio-markers of their patients. Unlike the plumbing layer, the augmentation layer of the NHS is not close to completion, but we do envisage the augmentation layer playing an important role in the ascent of Indian healthcare quality. Both the plumbing layer and the augmentation layer are designed as open, standardized interfaces. These layers serve as digital public infrastructure accessible to public and private entities wishing to build atop them.

That brings us to the fourth and final layer of the NHS: the application layer. This layer comprises all the government and private sector applications that aim to serve the diverse needs of Indian patients. The first three layers of the NHS exist so that the innovators and change-makers of the fourth layer are optimally empowered to organize, access, and process the data that they need to deliver the best service to their users.

National Health Stack Overview

The first session on the NHS followed this schedule and published the entire webinar on our official Youtube channel:

  •  An introduction to iSPIRT and our values
  • An overview of the NHS
  • A deep-dive into and demonstration of the PHR pillar of the plumbing layer
  • A question-answer session with the audience

The objective of the session was to drive awareness of the NHS components, objectives, timelines, and design philosophies. We want participants from all walks of healthcare to be engaged with the NHS and take part in building it.

In keeping with this objective, we will be hosting weekly open house sessions to keep diving deeper into the National Health Stack. The next such event will take place on Saturday (30th May) at 11:30 am. The focus of this second session will be on another pillar of the plumbing layer – the electronic registry system. More specifically, the session will focus upon the doctor registry. 

Readers who wish to learn more about the NHS are encouraged to share this post and sign up now for the session below or click here.

Readers may also submit questions about the NHS to [email protected] We shall do our best to answer these questions during next Saturday’s open house discussion. 

About the Author: The post is co-authored by our volunteers Aaryaman Vir, Siddharth Shetty and Karthik K S.

Further Reading