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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

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A Fond Sendoff

Today we are giving a fond sendoff to Praveen Hari and Venky Hariharan as they transition out of full-time volunteering and onto new challenges! This is a bittersweet moment: as excited as we are about their future plans, we can’t help but feel a sense of loss. We will most certainly miss their selfless energy in our mission to democratize credit in India.

Democratizing credit is vital for India’s future. This particular breed of the societal problem needs a jugalbandi between public platforms like India Stack and market players like banks, NBFCs, and Fintechs – a kind of jugalbandi that is new to our ecosystem. To bring it about, it needed catalysts like Praveen and Venky.

Praveen has been iSPIRT’s ‘dynamo’ behind flow-based lending. He has done innumerable learning sessions, pulled together countless borrower pools, knocked partnerships together, and was instrumental in the design of “Type-4” loans. He has been the go-to person on all things around flow-based lending for lenders, loan service providers (LSPs), technology providers, sophisticated model builders, and VCs. His can-do spirit is legendary: he has been an inspiring blend of thought-leadership and hustle for all of us volunteers in iSPIRT. Because of this, his name will be forever etched into the history of flow-based lending in India.

Venky anchored our Fintech Leapfrog Council (FTLC) efforts from the very beginning and took on the challenging task of helping incumbent banks embrace non-linear change. Since its launch, FTLC has been instrumental in kicking off a number of market experiments and has helped banks think through their strategies around UPI, BBPS, cash flow based lending, and the technology and data governance changes they need to transition to a new era.

Venky’s soft-spoken approach masks a determination to get difficult things done. His charm is legendary, and he used it to help leaders of FTLC banks practice intentional unlearning. This collective effort has moved the industry forward, helped the banks prepare for a more dynamic future, and set the stage for partnership between banks and new age technology and Fintech players.

As quintessential iSPIRT volunteers, both Praveen and Venky have created enormous ecosystem value, and they did it for the mission. Many market players benefited from their work, and (as is iSPIRT custom) not one paisa flowed to either of them. This selfless volunteering is the iSPIRT way. After subsisting on a small Living Wage as full-time volunteers, it is time for Praveen and Venky to move on.

New Beginnings
Praveen is planning to become an entrepreneur again. After his two month cooling off period, he will launch his new startup. We, for one, are hoping that this startup will be in the flow-based lending space! We are rooting for him to be the Jonathan Rosenberg of flow-based lending: Jonathan was instrumental in bringing SIP Protocol to life as an IETF standard, and in helping to create Skype as a winning implementation of SIP Protocol as its Chief Technology Strategist. We hope Praveen’s path will have a similar trajectory, both in direction and impact! In parallel, he will continue to volunteer part-time for our PSP Connect (formerly M&A Connect) program where he has been active since the beginning. He will no longer be involved in our policy work.

Venky is moving to IDFC Institute to create a new Data Governance Network. We are at the cusp of a new data regime and data economy in India driven by Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA), something that is very different from the paths taken by the US, Europe, and China. This Network will bring evidence-based inputs into the policy and practice of data governance; in this new world of data, it is key to secure empowerment and protection of each individual. Alongside this important new responsibility, Venky plans to keep volunteering part-time with iSPIRT on our software patents initiative where he has been active for many years.

When our full-time volunteers roll off to new challenges, they are a gift to the ecosystem. They carry with them an emboldened sense of what India can be, and an energized plan to make new things happen – in turn creating new capacity in the market.

Shifting Gears: Playground Orchestration
iSPIRT has been at work on the societal problem of democratizing credit for the last 4-5 years. We have made considerable progress, yet more needs to be done: Rajni is not yet being served as we would like it.

After some soul-searching, we realized that the next phase of ecosystem building for credit democratization needs a more deliberate orchestration of market and state actors.  Meghana Reddyreddy, a power volunteer, will drive this phase; she will don the mantle of Playground Orchestrator for Democratizing Credit.

Volunteering with iSPIRT
Our central tenet is that societal problems are solved by market players. To come up with truly innovative solutions, these market players need various kinds of public goods – scaleable public platforms, supportive policy and procedural guidelines, transformational market catalysts, and world-class playbooks – to succeed. Our volunteers build these public goods in a selfless fashion. They are often the most talented and driven folks in the ecosystem. Some do this public goods building on weekends. Others, like Praveen and Venky, take a year or two off from their career to do this.  

If you want to be one of these volunteers, read our Volunteer Handbook (https://pn.ispirt.in/presenting-the-ispirt-volunteer-handbook/) and feel free to reach out to us.

By Sharad Sharma, Pramod Varma, Siddharth Shetty for Volunteer Fellow Council and Pankaj Jaju for Donor Council.

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My iSPIRT Experience, A Learning Of A Lifetime By Praveen Hari

In 2016, the company I co-founded, Thinkflow, went through a liquidity event. It was a great outcome for all and I was thinking of the next move. It was natural for me to think of starting again. I was wiser, had seed capital and only had to find a problem attractive enough. It looked like I was going down that path and would build another software product company for the global market.

Something interesting was happening in India at that same time. All the global giants were investing in or had invested in companies that were building for India. Venture funds like Softbank, DST Global, Naspers were making bold bets in the Indian consumer space. A lot of digitization was also happening in India. UPI was in the initial release phase (Flipkart had already committed to back PhonePe, when it was just Sameer and Rahul’s idea), the GST bill was tabled in Parliament, a system to track real-time movement of goods was being discussed. It was really a lot of action and if venture investments were any indication, it was the validation of the India story.

In a meeting with Sharad, for the first time, I understood the true potential of the digital stack (now called the IndiaStack) that was taking shape then. While the stack was not fully ready for all the use cases that we covered in the meeting, the vision to solve some of the hardest problems India was facing through technology was fascinating. That vision combined with the kind of commitment the Open API team (it is now called the IndiaStack team) put in is unparalleled in my experience

I left the meeting with a question from Sharad.  “Do you want to do a 2-year MBA that pays you a small stipend?”. I thought about it and said ‘yes’. Amongst all the challenges, unlocking credit for small businesses resonated with me. Having faced the consequences of not having access to timely credit during my Thinkflow days, I could identify with this problem and ended up doing work around data-driven and cash-flow lending. We make a number of decisions in a lifetime but a few handfuls of them are life-changing. And my decision to work with iSPIRT and to focus on Flow-based lending has been a life-changing one.

Over the last 30 months, I worked towards Improving efficiencies in the loan delivery and collections cycle so we could bring a lot more borrowers to the formal system. As an iSPIRTer, I had the privilege of working with CEOs of banks, NBFCs and Small Finance banks to design new loan products. We were working on new ways to use data to underwrite small loans for new-to-credit businesses. I was guiding them on how to use technology to deliver credit at lower costs and worked alongside them to devise new strategies to build new workflows around origination, disbursement, collections, et al.

The iSPIRT stint has been a rewarding one. iSPIRT is all about putting country first and solving country scale problems. Core values such as this and others like setting up fellow volunteers for success were totally unheard of to me in the modern day workplace. iSPIRT is a safe space for any volunteer who is passionate about changing India. The institution has been about investing in the success of its fellows –  I had the benefit of learning from the wisdom of people like Nandan Nilekani, Sharad Sharma, Pramod Varma, Sanjay Jain. My colleagues are A-players and I had the opportunity to learn from and work alongside Meghana Reddyreddy, Nikhil Kumar, Venkatesh Hariharan, Jai Shankar, Tanuj Bhojwani, Siddharth Shetty and Karthik

As I prepare to roll-off my responsibilities at iSPIRT, I want to express my gratitude and a special thanks to Sharad Sharma for giving me this opportunity. He is a great guide and has been a great mentor for me. Thank you for being there for me when I needed you. It has been a great experience working with you and the team and my learnings here are my core strength as I move on to solving for India through my next venture.

8-Dec Digital Lending PlaybookRT for Bharat Entrepreneurs

With the maturity and large-scale adoption of digital payments & UPI, GST,  and an upcoming public credit registry, there is a unique opportunity to re-imagine credit products for Bharat MSMEs like never before. The digitization is set to generate significant value, moving from the traditional asset-based lending to flow based lending. Join us for an interactive roundtable on what is required for this transformation?

Click to Register for the Digital Lending playbookRT. (limited invites)

Our Maven

Praveen Hari

iSPIRT Foundation

 

 

This is a product startup founder/CXO (+1) invite-only events. Venue details will be sent along with the confirmation of your registration.

RoundTables are facilitated by an iSPIRT maven who is an accomplished practitioner of that Round-Table theme. All iSPIRT playbooks are Pro-bono, Closed room, Founder (+1), invite-only sessions. The only thing we require is a strong commitment to attend the sessions completely and to come prepared, to be open to learning & unlearning, and to share your context within a trusted environment. All key learnings are public goods & the sessions are governed by the Chatham House Rule.

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Understanding iSPIRT’s Entrepreneur Connect

There is confusion about how iSPIRT engages with entrepreneurs. This post explains to our engagement model so that the expectations are clear. iSPIRT’s mission is to make India into a Product Nation. iSPIRT believes that startups are a critical catalyst in this mission. In-line with the mission, we help entrepreneurs navigate market and mindset shifts so that some of them can become trailblazers and category leaders.

Market Shifts

Some years back global mid-market business applications, delivered as SaaS, had to deal with the ubiquity of mobile. This shift upended the SaaS industry. Now, another such market shift is underway in global SaaS – with AI/ML being one factor in this evolution.

Similar shifts are happening in the India market too. UPI is shaking up the old payments market. JIO’s cheap bandwidth is shifting the digital entertainment landscape. And, India Stack is opening up Bharat (India-2) to digital financial products.

At iSPIRT, we try to help market players navigate these shifts through Bootcamps, Teardowns, Roundtables, and Cohorts (BTRC).

We know that reading market shifts isn’t easy. Like stock market bubbles, market shifts are fully clear only in hindsight. In the middle, there is an open question whether this is a valid market shift or not (similar to whether the stock market is in a bubble or not). There are strong opinions on both sides till the singularity moment happens. The singularity moment is usually someone going bust by failing to see the shift (e.g. Chillr going bust due to UPI) or becoming a trailblazer by leveraging the shift (e.g. PhonePe’s meteoric rise).

Startups are made or unmade on their bets on market shifts. Bill Gates’ epiphany that browser was a big market shift saved Microsoft. Netflix is what it is today on account of its proactive shift from ground to cloud. Closer home, Zoho has constantly reinvented itself.

Founders have a responsibility to catch the shifts. At iSPIRT, we have a strong opinion on some market shifts and work with the founders who embrace these shifts.

Creating Trailblazers through Winning Implementations

We are now tieing our BTRC work to specific market-shifts and mindset-shifts. We will only work with those startups that have a conviction about these market/mindset-shifts (i.e., they are not on the fence), are hungry (and are willing to exploit the shift to get ahead) and can apply what they have learned from iSPIRT Mavens to make better products.

Another change is that we will work with young or old, big or small startups. In the past, we worked with only startups in the “happy-confused” stage.

We are making these changes to improve outcomes. Over the last four years, our BTRC engagements have generated very high NPS (Net Promoter Scores) but many of our startups continue to struggle with their growth ceilings, be it an ARR threshold of $1M, $5M, $10M… or whether it is a scalable yet repeatable product-market fit.

What hasn’t changed is our bias for working with a few startups instead of many. Right from the beginning, iSPIRT’s Playbooks Pillar has been about making a deep impact on a few startups rather than a shallow impact on many. For instance, our first PNGrowth had 186 startups. They had been selected from 600+ that applied. In the end, we concluded that we needed even better curation. So, our PNGrowth#2 had only 50 startups.

The other thing that hasn’t changed is we remain blind to whether the startup is VC funded or bootstrapped. All we are looking for are startups that have the conviction about the market/mindset-shift, the hunger to make a difference and the inner capacity to apply what you learn. We want them to be trailblazers in the ecosystem.

Supported Market/Mindset Shifts

Presently we support 10 market/mindset-shifts. These are:

  1. AI/ML Shift in SaaS – Adapt AI into your SaaS products and business models to create meaningful differentiation and compete on a global level playing field.

  2. Shift to Platform Products – Develop and leverage internal platforms to power a product bouquet. Building enterprise-grade products on a common base at fractional cost allows for a defensible strategy against market shifts or expanding market segments.

  3. Engaging Potential Strategic Partners (PSP) – PSPs are critical for scale and pitching to them is very different from pitching to customers and investors. Additionally, PSPs also offer an opportunity to co-create a growth path to future products & investments.

  4. Flow-based lending – Going after the untapped “largest lending opportunity in the world”.

  5. Bill payments – What credit and corporate cards were to West, bill payments will be to India due to Bharat Bill Pay System (BBPS).

  6. UPI 2.0 – Mass-market payments and new-age collections.

  7. Mutual Fund democratization – Build products and platforms that bring informal savings into the formal sector.

  8. From License Raj to Permissions Artefact for Drones – Platform approach to provisioning airspace from the government.

  9. Microinsurance for Bharat – Build products and platforms that reimagine Agri insurance on the back of India Stack and upcoming Digital Sky drone policy.

  10. Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) – with usage in financial, healthcare and telecom sectors.

This is a fluid list. There will be additions and deletions over time.

Keep in mind that we are trying to replicate for all these market/mindset-shifts what we managed to do for Desk Marketing and Selling (DMS). We focussed on DMS in early 2014 thanks to Mavens like Suresh Sambandam (KissFlow), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), and Krish Subramaniam (Chargebee). Now DMS has gone mainstream and many sources of help are available to the founders.

Seeking Wave#2 Partners

The DMS success has been important for iSPIRT. It has given us the confidence that our BTRC work can meaningfully help startups navigate the market/mindset-shifts. We have also learned that the market/mindset-shift happens in two waves. Wave#1 touches a few early adopters. If one or more of them create winning implementations to become trailblazers, then the rest of the ecosystem jumps in. This is Wave#2. Majority of our startups embrace the market-shift in Wave#2.

iSPIRT’s model is geared to help only Wave#1 players. We falter when it comes to supporting Wave#2 folks. Our volunteer model works best with cutting-edge stuff and small cohorts.

Accelerators and commercial players are better positioned to serve the hundreds of startups embracing the market/mindset-shift in Wave#2. Together, Wave#1 and Wave#2, can produce great outcomes like the thriving AI ecosystem in Toronto.

To ensure that Wave#2 goes well, we have decided to include potential Wave#2 helpers (e.g., Accelerators, VCs, boutique advisory firms and other ecosystem builders) in our Wave#1 work (on a, needless to say, free basis). Some of these BTRC Scale Partners have been identified. If you see yourself as a Wave#2 helper who would like to get involved in our Wave#1 work, please reach out to us.

Best Adopters

As many of you know, iSPIRT isn’t an accelerator (like TLabs), a community (like Headstart), a coworking space (like THub) or a trade body. We are a think-and-do-tank that builds playbooks, societal platforms, policies, and markets. Market players like startups use these public goods to offer best solutions to the market.

If we are missing out on helping you, please let us know by filling out this form. You can also reach out to one of our volunteers here:

Chintan Mehta: AI shift in SaaS, Shift to Platform Products, Engaging PSPs

Praveen Hari: Flow-based lending

Jaishankar AL: Bill payments

Tanuj Bhojwani: Permissions Artefact for Drones

Nikhil Kumar: UPI2.0, MF democratization, Microinsurance for Bharat

Siddharth Shetty: Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA)

Meghana Reddyreddy: Wave#2 Partners

We are always looking for high-quality volunteers. In case you’re interested in volunteering, please reach out to one of the existing volunteers or write to us at [email protected]

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Leveraging GST data for Flow based Lending

Access to formal credit continues to be one of the largest challenges faced by MSMEs in India due to lack of verifiable data about their business.Digital payments data combined with GST data has the potential to unlock millions of SMEs & bring them into the formal system. India is going through a Cambrian explosion of data usage. It is estimated that the monthly data consumption on every smartphone in India is estimated to grow nearly five times from 3.9 GB in 2017 to 18 GB by 2023 as per a report by Swedish telecom gear maker Ericsson.

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Picture Source: Digital Desh

As businesses and their processes get digitized, it provides us a unique opportunity to re-imagine credit products for MSMEs like never before.

In order to move from traditional Asset-based lending to Data based lending it is important to make the following design considerations:

  • Underwriting based on Data – Assess creditworthiness in real time based on the consented data provided by the user
  • Low-Value – Bringing down the cost of processing a loan using digital platforms like eKYC, eSign & UPI enables one to process sachet sized loans
  • Smaller Tenures – Offer small tenures to reduce risk and thereby build better credit history of a customer
  • Customised Loan Offers – In the old world, loan products were designed to be one size fits all; With data & better underwriting, create a “loan offer on the fly” for a borrower based on his need

Getting started with GST Data Based Lending – Basics

  • Over 8M+ businesses in India will file GST returns
  • Every invoice in the GSTN system is verified by the counterparty
  • GST returns are digitally signed and this data can be accessed through consent of a small business

To access this data, you need the understand the three types of GST APIs:

  • Authentication – Allows a taxpayer to login into his GST account from any application
  • Returns – Allows a taxpayer to file his returns from any application
  • Ledger – Allows a taxpayer to view & share his tax data with any application

You can access the GSTN Sandbox & APIs here: bit.ly/GSTAPIs

If you want more insights, do join the GSTN Discussion Forum here: bit.ly/GSTgroup

The GSTN Tech Ecosystem

Goods and Service Tax Network is a section 8 company set up to provide common and shared IT infrastructure and services to the Central and State Governments, Tax Payers and other stakeholders for the implementation of the Goods & Services Tax (GST).

In this context, it is important to understand the below two roles of GSTN:

  1. Direct portal for taxpayers – https://services.gst.gov.in/services/login
  2. Expose APIs thru GSPs (GST Suvidha Provider) – http://www.gstn.org/gsp-list/

GST Introduction (1)

GST Suvidha Provider (GSP) – Companies which provide GST API Gateway as a service to application service providers; They are appointed by the GSTN and list of the GSPs can be accessed here:http://www.gstn.org/gsp-list/

ASPs – Companies which provide the user interface for business to file or fetch their returns from the GSTN

Naturally, ASPs are a great fit as distribution partners for lending as they own and control the end user experience of small businesses. Some of the examples are:

Accounting Software Providers

    • They help small business manage their accounting, inventory & even payroll;
    • They have rich data sets about the small business including their GST returns Eg: Tally (Desktop), Zoho/Cleartax/Profitbooks (Cloud-based)

Tax Filing Software Providers

    • These companies help business who use excel/manual billing/custom software to prepare their GST return & file it every month;
    • One of the key stakeholders here is the accountant who essentially is the business advisor for an SMB and tapping into them as an influencer channel is a great opportunity Eg: Cleartax, SahiGST etc.

Supply Chain Automation Companies:

    • Today many FMCGs and Large manufacturing companies are using software to track their sales/inventory in their supply chain; For e.g: Asian Paints, Tata Steel, ITC etc.
    • As these companies enable a large of wholesalers, retailers to use their software problem, there is a great opportunity to extend credit to their entire ecosystem
    • Eg: Moglix, Channel Konnekt, Bizom etc.

Example of a Lender – ASP Partnership

  • Consider a services-based company which provides advertising services to multiple companies
  • Let’s assume they use an accounting software like for example Cleartax or Zoho
  • In the software, the SMB sees a one-click credit button (This is enabled through an integration with the ASP & lender)
  • In a few clicks, the SMB is able to share multiple types of data like – GST, Payroll, Balance Sheet, Bank Statement etc. with the lender
  • With consent, the lender uses this data for underwriting, build a credit score and makes a credit offer to the SMB
  • The SMB provides his bank account details for real-time loan disbursement and based on the type of the business you can complete KYC
  • Take mandate either digitally or physically based on the customer for repayments

There are various other data sources one could use to improve the underwriting like – Smartphone, Payments Data from the Bank, Bill Payments, Electronic Toll Collection & various others. Algorithms can use these data sources along with other other public data sets like – Seasonal demand for a product, Import/Export, GDP, Consumption Patterns to do contextual lending.

We recommend you go through the presentation above to understand these basics & do watch the pre-recorded webinar session below on How to Leverage GST data for Flow-based lending for more details.

At iSPIRT, we are working with multiple stakeholders to create a winning implementation of Flow-Based Lending. Do watch out for future announcements from us for entrepreneurs working in this space or write to us [email protected] to know more.

About the Author

Nikhil Kumar is a full-time fellow with iSPIRT Foundation, a non for profit think-thank and has been focussed on building the developer ecosystem for the India Stack.

Twitter: @nikhilkumarks