A swift solution to ease cash crunch for salaried

Hyderabad: If you are one of those who are cash-strapped towards the end of the month or is in need of an urgent loan, try FlexSalary. A city-based financial tech startup, FlexSalary is a branded loan product of Vivifi India Finance Private Limited which is India's first emergency personal line of credit and a non-banking finance company (NBFC) registered with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). It claims to provide easy financial assistance to professionals to overcome their mid-month and month-end financial needs.

The company provides unsecured loans from as low as Rs 4,000 up to Rs 2 lakh for up to 30 days. In a month after its launch in August 2017, the app registered 500 loan applications per month after that they have grown rapidly and now, they register around 35,000 applications per month. The app is currently available on Play store for all android and IOS devices.

Vivifi which was founded by technocrats and career bankers having a collective experience of over 75 years in secured and unsecured retail lending. It deals with customers across the credit spectrum, their dream is to offer a variety of convenient, easily-accessible financial and loan services in a safe, efficient and professional environment to all desiring customers without any prejudices or biases based only on the customer's ability to repay.

"I have been an entrepreneur all my life. I was instrumental in launching one of the first web-page loan management systems delivered on a cloud 17 years ago for a small-dollar lending space in the USA. That's where I was associated with financial technology for almost that entire length of time.

After my stint with the USA-based firm as a CEO for a long period, I got out and launched another company called TekFriday Solutions in 2013 in Miami with an office in Hyderabad that specialises in Lending Portfolio Management in digital sub-prime lending in USA in partnership with a USA firm.

The business has quickly grown in the three-year period since we had a very strong base in technology, underwriting, data science and AI-driven loan management system which is used to deliver a completely digital lending experience in the US market for emergency credit.

"Emergency credit in the US is a typical 400 to 1,000 dollar loan which they do for a short period of time. We thought we can use our skill set and our experience and bring a similar product to India and that's how we found Vivifi India Finance Private Limited and launched our first product FlexSalary in August 2017," said Anil Pinapala, CEO, Vivifi India Finance Private Limited.

"We incorporated the company in 2016 and applied for the RBI licence for our NBFC licence and officially launched it in August 2017," he says. The company is sustained by Anil Pinapala (CEO) who plays a key role in setting the overall vision and strategy while focusing on the areas of Credit Risk and Underwriting, along with Srinath Kompella (COO) who heads operations at Vivifi. Kompella has over 15 years of rich experience in analytics, process improvement and operations, who believes in customer satisfaction as the key metric of every supporting process.

Patrick Kishore is the chairman. He himself is a banking veteran who worked for 37 years as a full-time employee of State Bank of India in various capacities, managing credit policies and banking technologies before retiring as the Chief Information Security Officer of SBI group and has a good knowledge about the Indian digital money lending market.

"One can apply for a loan either on our website or from the FlexSalary app. After going through all the documentation which includes PAN info, bank and employment details the AI-driven algorithm will make a real-time decision based on documentation to give a loan or not. If the AI is unable to process the request, then a manual agent will look after the application. Our objective is to automatically make a loan decision as much as possible in most cases," adds Anil.