How Avail Finance leveraged HyperVerge Tech to remove manual KYC bottleneck

ABOUT AVAIL FINANCE

Founded in 2017 by Ankush Aggarwal and Tushar Mehndiratta, fintech startup Avail Finance has grown from being a lending platform to a neo-bank for the blue-collared workforce. With the help of technology, Avail offers personal loans, salary advances and savings to its target segment that has low credit card penetration and minimal cash reserves. 

In May 2021, Avail Finance raised Rs 24 crore in debt financing led by Alteria Capital. The BNPL pioneer, which has Ola, Falcon Edge, and Matrix Partners as its backers, recently acquired YeLo, a neo-bank operating in the same segment.

CHALLENGES

Millions of users come to Avail Finance platform and apply for CreditATM, a new-era credit line which provides lifetime credit through a simple one-time application. The standard application process for CreditATM requires users to submit their selfie, PAN details and then do a KYC. Due to a manual process, activation for a new user was done after 48 or 64 hours. Due to this delay, the user may push using the credit line for later or drop it altogether.

Near real time experience for customers

KYC verification was being done manually – a tedious and cumbersome process. The process used to take a lot of time, even for a genuine applicant. When the influx of applications was huge in number, it used to create a bottleneck for the operations team at Avail Finance. 

We asked Deepak Malani, Head of Product, to share details. According to him, the actual manual verification would take 5 minutes but applications would queue up and it could take many hours for an application to start getting reviewed. 

This verification process was so slow that Avail’s value proposition – instant personal loans – was not met! Further, Avail was losing customers because they would drop off and never return. This would in turn would make customer acquisition more expensive.

Detect bad actors on scale

To deliver on its mission, Avail Finance needed to make the KYC process fast for customers, at scale. But as a fintech, Avail Finance also had to verify customer identities for KYC before allowing them to apply for credit. Avail Finance needed a solution that automated the KYC process and kept a strong check on fraudulent applications. Additionally, it had to be cost-effective. Here, Avail Finance turned to HyperVerge.

Think about something which was being verified manually by a person sitting and trying to match the pin codes and the addresses. Now with HyperVerge tech, all this is an automated process with all details getting matched via OCR. This is the kind of experience that we always wanted.

Deepak Malani

Head of Product

SOLUTION

Avail Finance partnered with HyperVerge technology for a remote onboarding process. Their engagement with HyperVerge started with the KYC automation. The customer is asked to click a selfie and upload an ID codument. KYC then performs an ID-OCR, a facematch between selfie and ID image, and also masks Aadhaar card for compliance.

There was a monumental shift in terms of the improvement in the user experience once Avail Finance integrated the HyperVerge solutions. “This kind of user experience brings a lot of delight to the customers,” said Deepak Malani.

What makes HyperVerge different?

Deepak Malani ​commended HyperVerge for being one of the very proactive teams in terms of the extensive support they provide. He recounted one interesting incident where Avail Finance had to get about 3.5 million documents digitised in a certain format. The team at Avail had a strict deadline and they turned to HyperVerge. “I think in a span of about a few hours, we were up and ready in terms of converting those documents into the format that we wanted,” added Deepak Malani, Head of Product, Avail Finance.

HyperVerge technology just works. So you don’t really have to be complaining about anything or think about anything new. As long as HyperVerge Tech is there, it just works fine. And if there is any issue, we have a bunch of folks who are always willing to help us out.

Deepak Malani

Head of Product

IMPACT

Avail Finance partnered with HyperVerge technology to reduce the KYC process from 2-3 hours to under 1 second, while offering a seamless user experience and preventing fraudulent applicants to go through.

Overall Avail saw a significant reduction in drop-offs and therefore a drop in cost of customer acquisition.

HyperVerge tech also helped Avail Finance in reducing operational costs.

What’s next?

As Avail Finance continues to grow and expand its customer offerings, HyperVerge will form the “technology backbone” for their business.