“The secret to long-term growth potential in our sector is creativity in product and process development” – By, Mr. Satyam Kumar, CEO & Co-founder, LoanTap

How has LoanTap’s journey been so far?

We started our journey in 2016 to provide fast, flexible, friendly loans to millennials. Since inception, we have witnessed a couple of disruptions in the financial segment starting from the global economic crisis, demonetization, liquidity crisis, to the COVID-19 pandemic, but despite all the ups and downs, we are growing exponentially as our current business model offers wide array of unique financial solutions to our customers like EMI Free Loan, Personal Overdraft, Credit card Takeover, Advance Salary Loan, etc. I can proudly say that we are continuously achieving greater heights by delivering fast and flexible loans to our tech-savvy customers.

How the company is bolstering the fintech segment with its innovative program

The secret to long-term growth potential in our sector is creativity in product and process development. We built LoanTap with the objective of providing financial solutions to our customers which can aid at every stage of life via a platform that can match the speed and spending-patterns of the millennials. We are bolstering the market by offering a variety of financial options such as EMI Free Loan, Personal Overdraft, Credit Card Takeover, Advance Salary Loans, etc. backed by technology led delivery. To boost our credit sourcing, credit profiling, eligibility tests, and loan disbursement procedures, we continuously update our in-house proprietary algorithms. Our experimentation led by intuition has helped us innovate in an otherwise dull segment and achieve the desired results.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

The pandemic brought forth both opportunities and challenges to every sector and the fintech segment has also not left any stone unturned to meet the challenges and come out stronger. Post the government’s announcement on the moratorium, we were flooded with requests. We started witnessing a surge in demands that came regularly and handling these requests manually was not a choice. In that scenario the only thing which helped us was technology. We started addressing consumer queries through various social media platforms, video calling apps, Whatsapp, and SMS. For us, the customer is the king, and to resolve the queries, we chose to simplify the whole procedure which helped us in dealing with the situation effectively.

Can you explain LoanTap’s growth journey?

In the last couple of years, lending has become the new favorite poster boy for all. It is not only the fastest growing industry but also is attracting the interest of the investors. LoanTap through it’s profitable business model has attracted over Rs 170 crore of funding and has always maintained a cash-positive balance sheet since its inception. We were able to manage and keep our cash burn very low which eventually helped us to achieve our targets. Till date, we have disbursed over Rs 590 crore of funds across 35000+ customers. Money is a raw material for us and therefore we aim to raise debt-and-equity rounds to create a larger loan book that can cater to more customers, especially in untapped markets.

What is your strategy to maintain the market share in the digital lending space?

As Fintech as a whole still forms a fraction of the Personal Finance space, gaining market share becomes imperative. We aim to achieve this through our relentless focus on product development backed by 3 core tenets – Fast, Flexible, Friendly Loans. While technology backed algorithms and processes help us in providing fast and flexible loans, being friendly is vital to increase market share. In order to connect with our target segment – millennials, as they form a dominant part of personal loan space, we are transparent across all our communications. This helps us instill trust and credibility in our relationship with all our customers.