How Navi used HyperVerge Tech to scale its business 20X in only 18 months

INTRODUCTION

About Navi Finance

Co-founded by Sachin Bansal and Ankit Agarwal in 2018, Navi aims to make financial services simple, transparent and accessible to all. Customers can avail personal loans within minutes through the Navi app. The process does not require the physical submission of any documents.

Navi started with digital lending and has served over 1.5 lac customers with their wholly-owned NBFC subsidiary ‘Navi Finserv’. Shortly after, Navi launched General Insurance under which they guarantee cashless claim approvals in under 20 mins.

CHALLENGES

Navi is a new NBFC – it doesn’t have a large operations team like legacy NFBCs do. For KYC, it needed a partner who could deliver automated KYC that didn’t need manual support.

KYC, or Know Your Customer, is important because it is mandated by the RBI. Moreover, a solid KYC process helps in reducing business risk. In physical KYC, the agent has to go to the applicant’s place to collect documents and verify them – it is a hassle for the customer and the operations team – and causes customer drop-offs.

Additionally, the cost of doing physical verification can be quite high. For the very small ticket loans that Navi gives – Rs 10,000 and so – the cost of operations can end up being more than the interest earned!

“See we are not a legacy player, we don’t have legacy systems to be migrated or anything. We wanted something which is tech first,” explained Abhishek Upadhyay.

SOLUTION

Navi’s evaluation criteria for selection was clear – (a) Cutting-edge technology (b) Vendor must be constantly investing into the technology to improve it (c) Reliability and uptime at scale.

Navi evaluated close to 4-5 players and picked HyperVerge as its digital and video KYC partner. We spoke to Abhishek Upadhyay, Senior Group Manager, Navi who explained that even though core solutions were the same in every vendor, only HyperVerge had the X-factor.

HyperVerge technology is used in the Navi personal loans product, where the entire journey from application to disbursement is digital – and involves no manual intervention. Navi processes close to 50,000 loan applications a day. Processing at that scale requires solid engineering in the backend – systems have to be top-notch in terms of accuracy and reliability. “So the bar is quite high,” Upadhyay said.

Not only was Navi able to achieve an automated KYC process at scale, it was also able to control fraud since HyperVerge tech prevented bad actors from entering Navi’s system.

It is all plug-and-play. HyperVerge APIs are easy to understand and these solutions are also very cost-effective. Whatever was being done for a few hundred rupees can be done reliably for just a few rupees without any inconvenience to the customer.

Abhishek Upadhyay

Senior Group Manager – Lending

What sets HyperVerge apart?

We asked Abhisek to explain what sets HyperVerge apart and he said that one of the most important factors was that HyperVerge had worked with very important government and private clients earlier. “Some of the work that they’ve done is truly cutting edge. And they have repurposed some of the technology to find newer applications,” said Abhishek.

Abhishek also spoke to us about documentation. Navi’s team had new engineers joining everyday and it was very important for Ahishek that the documentation should be clear and there should be no need for long KTs (knowledge transfers) or handovers.

Documentation is like a hallmark of a good tech company because ultimately when you want things to be scalable, everybody needs to be on the same page. With HyperVerge, we haven’t had to second-guess anything or verify because everything was in black and white and easy-to-understand.

Abhishek Upadhyay

Senior Group Manager – Lending

The third thing Abhishek mentioned was collaboration. Navi had specific requirements for the customer journey – which required customer solutions from HyperVerge. Navi also had a strict 3-4 week timeline for the implementation. And HyperVerge delivered.

How did it happen? Teams from both companies sat together and broke the project down into smaller chunks, prioritized them as per impact and went about solving each problem. In Abhishek Upadhyay’s words, this was a “great example of collaboration”.

IMPACT

Navi’s business has grown almost 20X in the last 1.5 years and HyperVerge solutions have played a major role in it.

Video KYC, which requires an agent, grew 10X. However, because HyperVerge tech was able to make the process more efficient, manpower gew only by 3-4X.

Conversions have also improved for Navi – 30-40% on a normalized basis.

In addition, “We’ve also had a fraud solution from HyperVerge which reduced fraud by almost 90 per cent. That was a specific kind of use case but it played a very important role in identifying key gaps in our system,” Abhishek Upadhyay concluded.

Navi is one of the largest digital fintech players in the personal loan space and HyperVerge has played a key part and continues to play a key part in growing and maintaining that product.

Abhishek Upadhyay

Senior Group Manager – Lending