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Software giant Salesforce’s new Digital Lending for India will offer banks and lenders a platform that will effectively reduce cost and the burden of maintaining the outdated platforms within the Indian banking system. “The biggest enabler has been the digital public infrastructure created by the Indian government. We have been able to build this custom solution for India by using this public digital foundation,” Deepak Pargaonkar, Vice President, Solution Engineering at Salesforce explained.
Pargaonkar told Indianexpress.com that the cloud-based platform consists of unique capabilities to cater to the diverse requirements of India’s lending ecosystem. “The uniqueness is that a lot of these capabilities are now pre-built into the platform… The forms have all required borrower information fields built-in, followed by seamless integrations for verifications suited to different loan products as per Indian regulations.”
He revealed that the new offering from Salesforce has India’s digital public infrastructure at the heart of it and these include Aadhaar, CIBIL, employment databases, and more. He said this seamless connectivity facilitates authentication, verification, and underwriting processes, streamlining the lending lifecycle.
Pargaonkar also highlighted that the Digital Lending platform incorporates India-centric underwriting rules and processes. He gave examples of specific parameters like income variables that are closely examined by lenders for home loans as per RBI norms before approval. For the uninitiated, underwriting means the process of a lender verifying the borrower’s income, assets, debts, credit, and property details to issue loan approvals.
One of the key features of the Digital Lending Platform is the unified underwriter console, which combines all borrower information, creditworthiness analysis, and predefined approval workflows. “The underwriter gets a screen with all the necessary borrower information and credit score. Based on the company’s predefined rules, they can approve, reject, or seek more data through the console itself.”
The Salesforce executive claimed that for Indian lenders, the ability to serve as a single source of truth for customer data is one of the significant USPs of the Digital Lending platform. “For existing customers, all relevant info like banking transactions, repayment history, and other profile details from the Financial Services Cloud is readily available within the lending workflows,” Pargaonkar explained. “For new borrowers, all necessary data is sourced through the pre-built connectors and integrated into the same unified platform. This consolidated view enables streamlined decisions.”
Considering the vast amount of data that is at hand, Pargaonkar assured that the platform is fully secure. “We do not have any visibility or access to the customer’s data. It remains fully secure and proprietary to the lender organisation,” he said, adding that the platform comes with consumer privacy preferences and data encryption at rest (stored data that is not moving between networks) and in transit. Consumers can also set preferences like not to be contacted, have their data forgotten after a period, etc. All such data protection policies and processes as required by the organisation can be implemented on the platform.
Beyond streamlining the entire lending process, Pargaonkar said that the Digital Lending Platform also allows lenders to automate their unique collection processes, communication strategies, defaults tracking, and more. As various other software products persist in this domain, Salesforce’s new offering is claimed to offer a holistic and customisable solution tailored to the ever-changing needs of the Indian market.
