The most advanced credit risk models or algorithms alike will all falter when faced with the paucity of their most fundamental resource: Data. The challenge FinTechs continue to face during credit assessment is the absence of data points to evaluate the real risk on large swathes of their target customer base; a customer whose actual income cannot be ascertained and without historical financial data or discipline.

The imperative for a prudent lender is to have a real perspective of underlying risks while vying for customers in this space. Lenders must adapt and develop alternative strategies to address the data gap, building stronger foundations for the future of the growing technology driven lending space, and balancing their risk adjusted return on capital.

In this presentation CRISIL Risk Solutions outlines innovative approaches to meet this challenge, and how different types of FinTechs may leverage their existing practices or evolve to adopt these techniques.

Amit Vora is Director, CRISIL Risk Solutions (CRS) and leads the business development, thought leadership and franchise building activities for this business. He has spearheaded adoption of CRISIL’s flagship early warning system across leading banks in India.

Mr. Vora was earlier a part of CRISIL’s Advisory business. He is a financing expert and has advised several clients in developing business strategies, innovative financing products, undertaking financial feasibilities and regulatory studies. His experience spans various geographies across India, SE Asia, Middle East & Africa. Mr. Vora has been instrumental in developing some of the landmark credit enhancement products for infrastructure financing in India and has also led studies around innovative financing options for SME financing.

Mr. Vora has represented CRISIL as a thought leader and corporate trainer in India and abroad. He is an MBA in Finance from T A Pai Management Institute, Manipal and has a Bachelors’ degree in Commerce from H R College of Commerce and Economics, Mumbai.

Technology and Digital Processes can change the way Financial Services have been operating for 100+ years around the world. Digital Platforms for Lending have seen great success and it is critical to identify the right pain point to solve for during the customer journey. Breaking down the customer journey into micro pieces and understanding how digitising the same or using technology to improve customer experience without impacting the overall portfolio quality is the key. Equally important is to use the data obtained through the simplification of process to improve efficiency of processes. Discussion on some of the learnings of using technology across the customer life cycle for a lending platform is the objective

Anubhav has a decade long experience of Credit Risk and Underwriting across Consumer and Small Businesses. He has developed Acquisitions, Underwriting, Sub-Prime Lending Strategy and Loyalty Analytics Strategy for companies like American Express and Citi. Focusing on the Consumer Lending industry in India for last 3 years, he is currently Heading Risk as Co-Founder of Qbera, a digital managed marketplace for Unsecured Personal Loans

With the easy access of Analytics, Machine Learning, AI, Blockchain and better computing power – more and more BFSI companies are exploring how these latest technologies can help them innovate and do things in better way. In this presentation, Mukesh Jain will talk about real FinTech use-cases been researched, developed by top BFSI companies and benefits achieved. He will also share how to gain these skills and ride the FinTech Wave

Mukesh Jain is Educationist, Author, Coach and Techno-Biz Leader with 22+ years of experience working with legendary people like Bill Gates, Satya Nadella and Mukesh Ambani. He has built & led multiple Global Teams and delivered Analytics & AI driven Innovative Products that used by Millions of people worldwide.

He is Chief Technology Officer at VFS Global, building large technology team to lead Technology driven Product Innovation and Business Transformation.

He has led R&D and built products like Outlook, Hotmail, Bing, Bing Analytics, Microsoft Advertising, Cloud, Telecom Big Data Analytics, Financial Analytics, Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Speech Analytics, Media Apps in companies like Microsoft, Reliance Jio, NICE & VFS Global in USA & India.

He is Mentor to Mr. Chandrababu Naidu’s dream project “International Institute of Digital Technologies” in Tirupati. As Subject Board Advisor at KJ Somaiya College of Engineering, he have revamped the syllabus of IT department. He is Advisor and visiting Faculty to Welingkar Institute of Management WeSchool, Aegis School of Analytics, Vanguard Business School, MGM Engineering College Nanded, RIT Engineering College and JSPM Pune.

He is the recipient of multiple awards, including Microsoft’s most prestigious “Gold Star” award 3 years in a row, Asia-Pacific Leadership Award, Outstanding Mentor, ASQ Quality Laureate, Quality of Service Award, QAI Agile Project Management Leadership Award, iSixSigma Best Six Sigma Black Belt, etc. Times of India Ascent AsiaPacific honoured him as “Top 25 Most Innovative HR Tech Leader in India” and recipient of “Technology Leadership” Award by Economic Times.

He worked at Microsoft for 13.5 years (mostly in USA) as R&D Engineering Director leading large global engineering teams. In 2011, he moved to India to setup Microsoft R&D centre in Bangalore and provided strategic & technical leadership for Microsoft-Yahoo! Alliance leading engineering teams in Analytics & Advertising. He successfully leading and executing Microsoft’s 1st Six Sigma project in 2001. He built Microsoft wide Business Analytics program (Business QoS), now used by all Microsoft Services.

In 2012, he joined Reliance Jio as Vice President & Head at Analytics & Advertising. He worked there for 2.5 yrs leading Advertising Business, Mobile Advertising RTB Platform, SMAC & Big Data Analytics. He developed the strategy and built one of the largest Big Data Analytics Platform in India providing real-time dashboard, detailed scorecard, predictive & prescriptive analytics for all the Jio Mobile app data.

As Vice President & Head of NICE in Pune, where he led multiple R&D teams in areas of Machine Learning & Big Data based large scale Analytics Platform in Financial, Transactional and Experience domains. He recently received recognition as “Outstanding Role Model” for his leadership in successfully setting up NICE Pune and building high performance team from 0 to 500+ in ~17 months.

He is seasoned Coach, Author and speaker. He regularly speaks at international conferences, B-Schools & Engg colleges (IITs, IIMs, BITS Pilani, NITs, SPJain, WeSchool) on variety of topics. As an Invited speaker, he has presented at International conferences like IIT Techfest, BizCon, CSI, IEEE, PMI, SEI SEPG, SPIN, WorldHRD, iSixSigma, QAI, NASSCOM, UNICOM, Agile, BZMedia, Better Software, IdeaBytes, Data Science Congress, IoT World, etc.

He areas of expertise is Software Architecture, Data Analytics, Design Thinking, Product Management, Software Testing, Big Data Analytics, Experimentation, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, DevOps, TDD, BDD, Metrics, KPIs, Lean, Six Sigma, Kanban, Software Engineering Processes, Project Management, Leadership, User Experience UX, etc.

He is BE (Computer Science), M-Tech (Data Analytics) from BITS Pilani & Executive Management program in Marketing & HR from IIT Bombay. He is Microsoft Certified Standards Professional, MCAS, MOS, CQIA, CSQA, CSTE, CQA, CTFL, MOF, ITIL, Licenced TSP Coach, PSP Engineer and Six Sigma Master Black Belt.

He is author of books “Delivering Successful Projects” and “Web Performance Improvement”. He is now writing books on “Applied Analytics & IoT” and “Personal Excellence”. He have published articles in Times of India, CIOReview & SiliconIndia Magazine.

The newest innovations following the present Aadhar-centric economy of India and new reforms by NPCI, bring in major solutions for security of online payments. So, technologies like AEPS (Aadhar Enabled Payment System), Real-time payments; are taking a major attention of the Leading Online payment solution providers.

While they are still under research, the major focus should be put on multi-biometric linked solutions, that are highly robust and specific to the users. Apart from these, Digital currencies can hold a bigger hand in future of online payments transfers.

Manoj Varma – Head of Product Management

Rapidly evolving technology and customer behaviour & a challenging regulatory environment are posing challenges to large banks not seen before. Technology is proving to a double edged sword – on the one hand it is pushing banks to invest more and more resources into fintech platforms and on the other hand it is driving down the cost of launching banking services like payments, lending enabling fintech innovators to encroach onto a traditionally secure client base for banking.

A new breed of breed of technology-driven and customer-centric financial institutions are using innovative fintech including artificial intelligence to disrupt the traditional banking business model. Large banks are now at cross roads – they have to keep their costs low and leverage the investments made in digital platforms over the last 3 to 4 year and the same time keep up with the innovators in the fintech world to ensure that they remain competitive.

Trailblazing Banking & Finance IT Expert with a brilliant track record across 24+ years of leading large-scale implementations of digital banking and payment systems in 5 continents: always delivering game-changing process improvements, products and exemplary motivational leadership.

GLOBAL EXPOSURE - My extensive exposure to clients and stakeholders gained by working with major multinational banks in USA, Mexico, Europe, Asia and Africa – has helped me lead the 8 million GBP Barclays Retail Banking Peer to Peer Payments App implementation across 10 countries in Africa and Western Europe.

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT- I ALWAYS challenge the status quo, communicate with conviction and candor (sometimes a bit too much!) across hierarchies, and am ready to take unpopular decisions to achieve change. This allowed me to reduce transaction costs at HSBC Mexico Payments IT by a full 30%.

REMARKABLE PEOPLE CONNECT- I realize that I lead a human process and that ultimately people make it all happen: I simply connect with each person in the chain, give them trust, remove hurdles in their path and let them achieve their potential. This was critical in helping me turn around production support availability from 93% to 99.8% for Barclays banking operations across 13 countries.

MOTIVATIONAL LEADERSHIP- An accomplished team builder and motivator, I am willing to get my hands dirty and work relentlessly till success is achieved. This ability to always lead by personal example resulted in the setup of the development team for HSBCnet – one of the most popular transaction banking platforms in the world today – in the HSBC Global Technology Centre. HSBCnet offer offers payments and cash management & trade service to clients all over the world.

MATURE COMPOSURE- I am extremely relaxed, even in the worst of crises and this infectious optimism reflects in my team’s performance. This attitude helped me achieve the deployment of a next generation mobile banking platform (Secure Container) in the largest bank in the Caribbean region in record.

SOLUTIONS FOCUS- I chase solutions with unyielding determination, open communication and process channels across hierarchies to implement them, and rarely, if ever, give up. This focus propelled me to develop new products like ZorryPay, ART, Secure Container which provide banks a fast and efficient way to manage their mobile infrastructure.

Mr. Varma is the Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of MoneyTap, based out of Bangalore in India. MoneyTap is India’s first app-based credit line for consumers.

MoneyTap was launched in 2015 and started issuing unsecured credit to salaried individuals in Bangalore, in Oct 2016. Since then, it has expanded to over 30 cities and is growing rapidly. MoneyTap is a product & customer focused company that partners with Banks and NBFCs to lend to consumers. It has filed multiple technology patents in this space and is VC funded by top investors such as Sequoia Capital, NEA and others.

Before starting MoneyTap, Mr Varma was the Founder and CEO of Tapstart, an analytics platform that helped Indians with intelligent job discovery and smart assessment of functional skills. Tapstart also worked with the NSDC (National Skills Development Corporation) in India to assess Trainees online. At its peak, Tapstart was serving over 3 Lakh Indians across 350 towns and cities, after which the company was sold, upon turning profitable.

Mr. Varma holds a B-Tech in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee and an MBA in Marketing from Indian School of Business. He initially worked in semiconductor technology for 7 years, after which he turned entrepreneur, in 2009.

Almost 15 years of application design, development and deployment experience in a Senior Developer/Team Leader/Architect / Sr. Manager Position.

An estimated 3 billion people around the world are underserved by the global financial sector, with limited or no access to quality credit. Often they are small business owners or salaried workers who, despite some financial stability, still don’t have access to products and services that allow them to be in control of their financial lives.

They often live outside of urban commercial centers and in areas unlikely to have brick and mortar institutions where they can access information to confidently make decisions about their finances. Typically these consumers have no formal credit score, or live in a market where credit bureaus are unreliable or nonexistent, further excluding them from formal services.

According to McKinsey, there is a $2.1-2.5 trillion unmet need for credit in emerging markets, with over 2.5 billion people in those regions accessing the internet via their mobile device.

Tala was created to change the perception that these underserved or low-income individuals are risky, by building a product that provides visibility and insight into their daily lives, and proves their potential. Through digitally-enabled credit, Tala’s underwriting models allow us to expand financial access to a segment of the population that have been long-excluded, and establish financial identities that serve as a stepping stone into the formal financial ecosystem. Only 31% of adults worldwide – 1.5 billion people – are covered by a credit bureau (World Bank); Tala’s proprietary scoring methodologies enable us to score up to 2X that population, introducing up to 3 billion consumers to the global market.

Tala’s ultimate vision is a world where all people have the financial access, choice, and control they deserve. Tala’s success will coincide with fundamental quality-of-life improvements for the world’s underbanked. Tala’s aims to make financial systems in emerging economies – and the people who depend on them – more visible and more trustworthy. By putting everyone on the same playing field, we can unlock the trillions of dollars in untapped potential in these markets and build a stronger global economy that doesn’t leave anyone behind.

Vipul is leading operations for Tala’s India business and has been part of the Financial Technology ecosystem in India for last three years. Previously he has worked with Citi in their investment banking division, advising clients in the Asia Pacific region.