iSPIRT Third Open House on OCEN: API Specifications & Next Steps

On 7th August we hosted the third open house discussion on Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN). This week’s session featured a deep dive into the underlying OCEN API flows, covering different entity interactions in-depth and addressing common technical queries. 

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 shed light on several potential Loan Service Provider (LSP) products and business cases. We also talked about the various opportunities for ecosystem participants across an OCEN-enabled cash flow lending value chain.

This week we dove into the API flows that make up the standardised end-to-end process of applying for a loan via an LSP, also illustrating how Account Aggregators will fit into this reimagined value chain. Our volunteers also covered the role of CredAll which is a collective of lending ecosystem players to drive cash flow based lending. 

The third 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 Ankit Singh
    • Recap of what OCEN is, and how LSPs fit in to the framework
    • Query 1: Is OCEN aggregating and sending loan applications to different lenders or does LSP make API requests with each lender separately?
    • Query 2: Are all API calls asynchronous? Are there Turnaround Time SLAs for the different services?
    • Query 3: Architecture diagrams – General LSP and Sahay GST
  • By Sudhanshu Shekhar
    • Query 4: API flow sequence diagrams
    • Query 5: How do I represent other loan products?
  • By Ankit Singh
    • Query 6: Using OCEN APIs and becoming an LSP
    • CredAll – a collective of lending ecosystem players

After the presentation, our volunteers answered some questions from the community including:
– What is the role of LSPs in the collections process?
– What is the difference between an LSP and a TSP?
– How does the Common Pledge Registry fit in?

We will be hosting weekly open house sessions to keep diving deeper into OCEN. The next such event will take place at 5pm on 14 August 2020.

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

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. We shall do our best to answer these questions during next Friday’s open house discussion. 

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