L&T Finance (LTF) & HyperVerge: Implementing AI at Scale

INTRODUCTION

L&T Finance (LTF) is one of India’s largest financial companies. It has always strived to work towards financial inclusion and has consistently expanded its services and offerings to the underserved regions of the country. In other words, it caters to Bharat – where most of the Indian population lives.

Over the years, LTF has empowered numerous individuals, farmers, and small businesses to reach their financial goals through its innovative financial products. The company aims to be a Fintech at scale by 2026, bridging India’s digital and financial divide.

One thing that we love about LTF is that it reaches countless numbers of people living in villages where even today 3G, 4G networks haven’t reached.

Kedar Kulkarni

CEO & Co-Founder, HyperVerge

Challenges faced by LTF

The rise of digital lending in India, especially in the last few years, has also seen a growth in identity theft and other fraudulent practices. Thus, identity verification becomes one of the most important parameters for enabling trust in a transaction. For LTF, it became essential to establish early warning systems capable of promptly identifying and addressing these challenges.

LTF wanted to partner with a reliable technology provider that could facilitate an error-free, seamless, compliant, and convenient onboarding process for its customers. From the outset, LTF expected the solution to be scalable. Moreover, given that LTF’s target audience includes rural India and beyond, it was crucial for the entire process to work in remote regions that typically have limited bandwidth and poor internet connectivity.

What LTF was looking for:

In summary, LTF was looking for an identity verification partner that is:

• stable at scale

• fast, convenient, and user-friendly

• reliable and accurate

• secure

How HyperVerge and LTF worked together:

With HyperVerge as their partner, LTF was able to quickly set up a customer onboarding process in quick three stages:

1. Reading of the KYC documents
   Some of the most commonly used KYC documents in India include Aadhaar card, Driving Licence, Voter’s ID, and PAN Card.

2. Liveness Check
   This process deploys HyperVerge’s proprietary algorithms to analyze the authenticity of a video or image, guarding against attempts to capture images of images, images of others and other fraudulent activities. HyperVerge’s single-image passive liveness technology operates effectively even under low bandwidths and low-end devices. This ensures a seamless and frictionless onboarding experience for customers, even in remote areas with weak internet connections.

3. Validation
   This stage is where a user’s identity is verified against the data extracted from the KYC documents, through central database checks and other methods. At this point discrepancies are detected and basic fraudulent checks are done.

The HyperVerge team is very good, very intelligent. They know what they’re doing.

Abhishek Sharma

CDO, LTF

The Impact created:

Speed
With HyperVerge’s ultra-fast identity verification solution, today LTF boasts of:

• A turnaround time (TAT) of 30 seconds for two-wheeler loans

• 45 seconds TAT for micro loans

• 5 minutes end-to-end TAT for consumer loans

Accuracy
The likelihood of a false match is less than 0.5% which demonstrates how accurate the solution is.

Uptime
One of the primary measures of whether a solution is working at scale or not, is its uptime. Throughout the duration of this partnership, there was never any significant downtime from HyperVerge.

There is only one definition for scale, that you do not have downtime. We never had a serious downtime from HyperVerge.

Abhishek Sharma

CDO, LTF

Digital Bharath Highlight: the Tamil Nadu Ration Card Pilot Program

As part of LTF’s mission to promote financial inclusivity and customer centricity, LTF identified that not all customers may be able to provide the conventional KYC documents like Aadhaar or Voter ID. So, LTF explored a pilot project with HyperVerge to assess the feasibility of using ration cards for verification.

LTF has constantly pushed us as a Technology Partner to do more, to innovate more.

Kedar Kulkarni

CEO, HyperVerge

However, several challenges had to be addressed:

1. Changing formats
   While documents like Aadhaar or PAN cards exist in a uniform format for everyone, the same can’t be said for ration cards. Many different formats exist (based on when they were issued) – in different shapes and sizes. This creates a big hurdle in setting up a robust digital verification system.

2. Inconsistent physical condition
   Different users keep their ration cards in varying conditions; some have it in neat laminated cases, while others may have one with multiple folds. So the algorithm needs to work across all these variations, which is tricky.

3. Lack of training data
   Given that ration cards are not one of the most used KYC documents, there is not enough training data available to feed to the AI engine.

LTF & HyperVerge worked together to successfully roll out a pilot in Tamil Nadu, where ration cards are now used as verification documents.

The journey ahead

LTF is focused on innovating complex digital lending products and with customer centricity at the core of LTF’s mission, the company is dedicated towards building solutions that can keep the user journey fast and convenient. HyperVerge is working very closely with LTF in that context.

Our product scope is expanding. We are becoming much more customer-centric. And to that extent, the product scope of HyperVerge will keep expanding.

Abhishek Sharma

CDO, LTF

LTF’s partnership with HyperVerge has significantly enhanced its identity verification processes, ensuring secure, efficient, and user-friendly digital lending experiences for customers. With shared aspirations of advancing financial inclusion in India, both organizations are poised to continue innovating and making a positive societal impact in the financial services sector. Trust in digital lending is the cornerstone of this collaboration, empowering LTF to continue its journey towards becoming a fintech leader and serving the diverse financial needs of India’s population.