OCEN, 2020, ONDC for BFSI 2023, PTPFC by RBI Innovation HUB 2023 , ULI by RBI innovated by RBI Innovation HUB in 2024 , DPI/‘Digital rails are great access to public and public permissoned data like land records and crop data , fintechs like WhatsLoan, banks like Union Bank have worked on this from 2020 from The time Digital Kisan Credit Card Guidelines kicked in in Sept 2022 at GFF 2022 announced by RBI Governor was launch of Digital KCC pilot by 2 banks .. WhatsLoan has built this for agrilending for Gramin Bank in Karnataka in 2020, successfully sevicing > 3 lac farmers , launched Digital KCC STP in 2022 Sept using PTP FC , land record access APIs given by RBI Innovation HUB for Union Bank and other banks .. ULI , OCEN , ONDC for BFSI offer huge opportunities for fintechs to build , as they offer common digital rails, there is more to do by fintechs to work between borrowers and banks , that is 10 times effort to work with banks existing LMS, CBS systems to make it more intergrated lending system to offer end to end digital native systems with STP in an assisted and self model, both OTP based and biometric based at branch and BC level , in multilingual formats super easy few steps and less than 5 minutes delivery of loans esp agri loans which is super hard , as each state is country in India We have submitted proposal through FCC to RBI for future of gold lending , dematerising gold , making storage of gold for ownership or loans interoperable with common storage , allow billion and gold coins to be allowed for loans along with e gold , tokenisation helps it next level , this brings SEBI for custody and RBI for lending to work together , happy to exchange thoughts here !!
This week, the RBI Governor announced the upcoming launch of the Unified Lending Interface (ULI) It was fantastic to see a small demo of ULI at the Global FinTech Festival 2024 yesterday... Similar to how UPI provided a “standard” for payments, ULI aims to provide a “standard” for sharing of lending data. Few points worth highlighting ⤵️ (1) This is NOT the 1st attempt to build a lending protocol in India - iSPIRT (a volunteer driven org) began work on OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network) back in Sept 2020 - The OCEN framework is now on v 4.0; lots of volunteers from Juspay Razorpay etc are contributing to the framework - OCEN has had a series of successful pilots in cashflow based lending to FPOs (Farmer Producer Orgs) (2) This is also NOT the 2nd attempt to build a lending protocol in India - ONDC (India’s e-commerce protocol) began work to launch lending on its rails in August 2023 - The ONDC loans offering is very similar to ULI i.e. any ONDC Buyer App can (subject to review) enable loans as a category - Loans as a category is already live on ONDC with players like Paisabazaar (you can find some videos online about the 6-minute unsecured loan journey) (3) What we know about ULI so far? - ULI is going to go one step further by integrating with the digitized land records from the Dept of Land Resources; which means borrower credit worthiness can be assessed via alterative means. - There are numerous private sector TSPs (Tech Service Providers) who provide a version of ULI (i.e. plug & play API access to co-lenders & various data sources) e.g. Perfios and Yubi ⚠️Some important reflections: (a) Why would RBI launch ULI when ONDC Loans & OCEN exists? Very simple answer: - ONDC Loans is a “closed” framework limited to ONDC’s Buyer & Seller app ecosystem - OCEN focuses on cashflow lending (one particular category of loans) which is more along the lines of PSL (Priority Sector Lending) to MSMEs - RBI’s ULI would (like UPI) be an open ecosystem i.e. usable by any bank, NBFC, LSP etc and cut across all types of loans (secured v/s unsecured, consumer v/s biz,) (b) Would private sector players providing similar infrastructure be at risk? - The answer is NO. There would need to be a lot of custom & out-of-the-box integration work to allow a financial institution’s core systems to speak to the ULI framework - These integrations would continue to provide a meaningful revenue opportunity to FinTech startups who currently provide similar infrastructure as a private service (c) RBI does NOT intend to get into infrastructure for loans distribution - ULI is NOT focused on loan distribution but it is instead focused on loan data sharing We can expect a whitepaper from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Innovation Hub on ULI quite soon! ➡️Overall, quite bullish on ULI —> It is great to see RBI promoting Digital Public Infrastructure, I love the RBI Governor’s line that the new trinity will be “JAM - UPI - ULI” #india #fintech