Acies Ventures Announces Strategic Investment in Fintech Neoble

Acies Ventures, the investment arm of Acies, has announced a strategic investment in Neoble, a technology-driven platform specializing in loan-against-securities products. This investment aligns with Acies Ventures’ commitment to transforming financial services by backing companies that enhance market infrastructure, digital lending, and financial inclusion.

Neoble’s platform enables customers to seamlessly pledge their financial securities—such as mutual funds and equities—to obtain loans efficiently. By digitizing the entire loan process, including KYC verification, agreement execution, and disbursement, Neoble ensures borrowers can access funds within hours, significantly reducing traditional processing times. The company is addressing the underpenetrated loan-against-securities market in India, particularly among retail investors.

Driving Innovation in the Loan-Against-Securities Space

With traditional loan-against-securities products being inaccessible primarily to retail investors due to complex processes and high entry barriers, Neoble is disrupting the market by introducing a simplified, digital-first approach. By streamlining the entire lending cycle and reducing processing times significantly, Neoble is enhancing financial inclusion and ensuring that individuals can easily unlock their investments' liquidity.

Commenting on the investment, Muzammil Patel, CEO of Acies, said, "Our investment in Neoble aligns with our vision to revolutionize financial services through technology-driven solutions. Neoble's innovative platform provides quick and efficient access to credit and brings awareness to retail investors on the benefits of leveraging their financial assets. We believe this partnership will significantly contribute to financial inclusion and market transparency."

Leveraging Technology for Market Transformation

Neoble's approach is deeply rooted in leveraging advanced technology to create a frictionless experience for borrowers. Its intuitive platform allows customers to complete loan applications, pledge their securities, and receive funds without extensive paperwork or prolonged processing times.

Abhinava Bajpai, Head of Acies TechWorks, highlighted the technological advancements Neoble brings to the market, "Neoble's platform exemplifies the fusion of cutting-edge technology with financial services. By digitizing the loan-against-securities process, they have created a user-friendly experience that caters to the evolving needs of today's retail investors. We are excited to support Neoble in scaling their operations and reaching a broader marketplace."

JP Sinha, Founder and CEO of Neoble adds: "Neoble’s platform is redefining how retail investors can access alternative financing options instead of the traditional consumer loans. By digitizing the loan-against-securities process, we are bringing much-needed awareness, accessibility, speed and ease-of-use to retail investors. We are excited to have Acies Ventures as a strategic investor and share our vision to enhance financial inclusion in India."

Acies Ventures' Commitment to Market Development

Acies Ventures invests in companies transforming financial services, market infrastructure, and technology adoption. With a strong focus on supporting entrepreneurs to solve real-world problems, Acies Ventures is dedicated to strengthening digital ecosystems that empower individuals and businesses.

About Neoble

Neoble is a forward-thinking financial services platform that focuses on delivering secure, efficient, and customer-centric solutions. The company aims to simplify financial management, empowering individuals to make informed decisions quickly. Neoble's approach blends speed, control, and convenience, offering seamless experiences for its users. With a team of industry experts and a commitment to innovation, Neoble strives to build trust and redefine the path to financial success, ensuring that investments remain entirely in the hands of the customers.

About Acies

Acies is a multinational firm offering a diverse range of technology platforms, consulting services, content solutions, and strategic investments. We empower businesses to implement, scale, and achieve sustainable growth.

Fintech Firm InCred Acquires Loans Platform Qbera

InCred Management & Technology Services Pvt. Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of InCred Financial Services Limited announced that it has acquired Qbera, a leading fintech platform, from Ant Creditex Technologies Pvt. Ltd., for an undisclosed amount.

Qbera has built a strong lending platform for personal loans which offers loans to middle income salaried individuals who are typically underserved by incumbent banks & NBFCs on account of their employment with a wide range of smaller employers. These loans were offered in partnership with a range of leading financial institutions such as IndusInd Bank, RBL Bank and Fullerton, allowing the platform to offer best-in-class pricing to customers, combined with a superior customer experience.

InCred, in its own personal loan business, has developed deep capabilities across risk, analytics, technology and collections. InCred’s sharp focus on process and risk management has allowed the company to build a high-quality loan book with superior risk-reward ratios - something the institution is sharply focused on growing in the coming years. Promoting financial inclusion has also been of prime importance to InCred since its inception, through initiatives such as the provision of loans to ‘new to credit’ customers.

Through its acquisition of Qbera, InCred will look to augment its digital distribution strengths. Conversely, the platform business will also benefit from InCred’s legacy personal loans expertise and provide full-stack loan origination capabilities in risk-sharing partnerships with other leading financial institutions.  

Bhupinder Singh, Founder & CEO of InCred said that, “The Qbera acquisition importantly marks the launch of InCred’s platform business - a first of its kind for an NBFC of our size in India. We have built best-in-class risk management, technology and analytics capabilities across different asset classes like education, MSME and Consumer loans. We look to leverage them in strong partnerships with leading financial institutions in India, and abroad. We are confident of the significant value that the Qbera platform will generate as a part of the InCred Group.”

Aditya Kumar, Founder & CEO of Qbera commented on the same that, “Being a part of InCred provides Qbera critical cross-functional expertise that are essential in taking the Qbera platform to new heights. Having access to superior risk and technology capabilities will play a vital role in scaling the business, especially in a post-Covid world. We strive to achieve our common vision of building the best platform business in the coming years."

Market buzz had previously pegged the deal value at USD10-15 million.

As part of the transaction, Founder & CEO of Qbera, Aditya Kumar, has joined InCred and will continue to head the Platform business, as well as the InCred personal loan business.  Co-Founder and VP Product, Anuj Sachdev, has taken an advisory role.

About InCred

InCred is a new-age financial services group founded with the vision of providing credit to Incredible India and thus, furthering financial inclusion in the country. The company endeavours to disrupt the status quo in traditional lending that seems to exclude those most in need of credit, due to outdated, rigid and often inefficient processes. The company has designed its products with a razor-sharp focus on serving the unique needs of these under-served segments of customers and leverages technology and data-science to make lending quick, simple and hassle-free. It aspires to be the key partner for all financial requirements of an Indian family.  

About Qbera

Qbera is an online lending platform providing fast, frictionless, and fair personal loans to professionals. Launched in January 2017, the company is headquartered in and operates out of Bangalore and provides lending services through an end-to-end digital platform, enabling transfer of funds to the borrower within 24 hours of receiving the online application.It is a product of Credit Exchange, a Bangalore-based fintech startup in the consumer lending space.

With its online platform based on LendFoundry, a state-of-the-art fintech lending solution, Qbera was launched with the chief objective of addressing the growing need in the market for quick and convenient delivery of personal finance services. One of the company’s main areas of focus is providing loans to potential borrowers who are largely overlooked by banks and financial institutions.

Digital Loan Marketplace Quikkloan Secures Funding from clutch of Angel Investors

Delhi-based Fintech startup Quikkloan is digital loan marketplace which facilitates personal loans through its leading partnered banks and NBFC’s. The Company offers loans to blue and white-collar salaried individuals with at least 20,000 a month through a mobile app and website. The company focuses on helping first time borrower to build their credit profile by offering loans through its partnered Banks / NBFC. Quikkloan was featured as Top 10 startups of a Global fintech accelerator Startupbootcamp in Mumbai Fintech Program 2017. 

It has raised a seed funding led by angel investors including Arun Diaz, advisor of Aavishkaar, Aasif Ahsan Khan, MD & CEO Of Fab Technologies and Sanjay Budhwar, a corporate honcho for an undisclosed amount. 

The startup will utilize the funding to improve the products technological, data science capabilities, hiring the team, ramp up marketing & sales and customer service teams to expand in more cities.

The Company is building end-to-end automated digital lending platforms to enable online disbursal of personal loans with an instant approval facility of credit to bank in minimum 48 hours. The company is aiming for loan processing and underwriting completely paperless unlike competitors is still sourcing leads online and service offline.  

The Company is developing proprietary credit decision underwriting platform using alternates data points such as social media, mobile handset data, bank statement, ITR, utilizing customers’ transactions histories, data points to assess factors like financial health, comparative market performance, social reliability and compliance and other data sources on big data analytics and machine learning to deliver creditworthiness of a salaried individual who are skilled blue and white collar Employee without a credit history.

In addition, Quikkloan is working on product recommendation rule engine, which will suggest the right products from various banks pool of products with features such as instant approval, paperless documentation and a digital customer on–boarding experience for quick approval and disbursals. 

The fintech startup also has future plans to foray into other financial products such as 0% EMI scheme, salary advance, virtual credit cards, 3-6 months educational loan, marriage loans, lifestyle loans and refinancing of credit card.

Our loan average ticket size 65,000 for a minimum tenure of 12 months. Since its inception, Quikkloan has received applications from over 100+ cities across all 29 states and union territories. The company plans to bring down loan ticket size to as low as 5,000 for duration of 3 to 12 months and is focusing on penetration in the Tier 2 and 3 markets. 

We aim to help NBFCs / Banks to lower credit risk, increase loan approval rates. Our product recommendation algorithm to suggest the right products, and customer acquisition or product distribution strategy makes us different from our competitors.

We are looking to data science and machine learning technique to develop more robust credit scoring underwriting platform by using alternate data.” says Jamil Akhtar Founder & CEO  has over 15 years of experience in research, advisory, consulting and investment banking.  

Quikkloan is looking to partner with startups & corporates including Uber, Zomato, Grofers, Bigbasket, Quess Corp, teamlease, flipkart and Amazon to offer short-term loans. The Company competes with IndiaLends, myloancare, shubhloans, and loantap among others 

Cashsuvidha And Rupeelend Join Hands To Build Pay Day Loan Market In India

Ever heard about the concept of Payday Loans in the Indian Market? Well, how can we, we have 1000 other banks going mad at us offering us loans and telling us about various schemes. Extremely popular in the markets of UK, Canada, Australia and UK, payday loans is all set to enter the Indian markets with the advent of new synergies and collaborations happening here with the Indian Participants.

But, before that let us study what a Payday Loan looks like, and what are the underlying benefits of this?

A payday is a small, short-term unsecured loan, "regardless of whether repayment of loans is linked to a borrower's payday. The loans are also sometimes referred to as "cash advances," though that term can also refer to cash provided against a prearranged line of credit such as a credit card. Payday loans rely on the consumer having previous payroll and employment records. 

The basic loan process involves a lender providing a short-term unsecured loan to be repaid at the borrower's next payday. Typically, some verification of employment or income is involved, although according to one source, some payday lenders do not verify income or run credit checks. Individual companies and franchises have their own underwriting criteria.

In the more recent innovation of online payday loans, consumers complete the loan application online (or in some instances via fax, especially where documentation is required). The funds are then transferred by direct deposit to the borrower's account, and the loan repayment and/or the finance charge is electronically withdrawn on the borrower's next payday.

The entry of payday loans in Indian Market is still a fresh ground. But the Indian scenario is such that it has lower income from jobs, so payday at lower rate of interests due to less job security can be a real time benefit to all the parties. Capitalizing this factor into account, CashSuvidha has entered a perfect tie-up with Rupeelend to make the market of payday even much stronger in India. The partnership aims to further build the payday loans market in India.

[Top Image - Shutterstock]

CarDekho.com Launches Digital Loan Platform for Used Car Dealers

CarDekho.com, Indian auto portal, has launched Digital Loan Platform for Used Car Dealers to provide hassle-free loan experience to their customers. A potential car buyer can simply ask their dealer for loan offers on any pre-inspected car and with a few click partner dealers can check their eligibility on the spot with multiple banking partners. They can also start the loan application process in seconds by uploading their KYC and basic documents on the platform.

Every year more than 3 million used cars are sold in India. However, finance penetration on these transactions remains low due to limited process innovation in this space. Lenders need to assess quality of the underlying car, along with the creditworthiness of a buyer and manage the title transfer process. This makes the entire used car loan process cumbersome for both customers and dealers. Naturally, dealers often end up discouraging loans to their customers to encourage faster inventory turnover on their used car stock.

CarDekho.com has partnered with leading banks, including HDFC Bank, Axis, Tata Capital, Mahindra Finance etc, to promote penetration through digital innovation. The company has developed deep tech integrations with these banks to generate instant & customized EMI quotes and enable instant applications. Through its proprietary tech systems the company plans to cut down loan processing time to <72 hours as compared to average 10-15 days currently. Its CarDekho.com Trustmark certification report ensures assessment of car quality, and thus avoiding post processing delays.

Speaking on the launch, Rajat Sahni, CEO-Used Cars, CarDekho.com, said, “It is a hassle for a used car buyer to apply for a loan due to the lack of clarity on loan amount, higher rates of interest and delays in processing time. Right now, 70% of new car buyers opt for a loan while only under 15% of used car buyers end up financing their car. With our new solution, we plan to  change this drastically.”

According to a customer survey, more than a third of respondents ended up buying a car in a higher segment than the one they began their search after having clarity on loan amount. “That’s why it is important to find loan offers and show EMI tags. We aim to revolutionize the service levels in used car finance and make it as easy as new car finance,” says Rajat.

Commenting on the partnership, Nitish Nagori, Business Manager, Auto Loans, HDFC Bank said, "We are delighted to partner with CarDekho.com to offer the whole gamut of our product offerings. As a market leader in this category along with our wide distribution network in the urban, semi-urban and rural areas, our association with cardekho.com will help customer discover HDFC Bank's latest offers on used car finance and am sure we will be able to fulfill their demand.”

CarDekho.com has already facilitated annualised loan GMV of US$20+ million since the launch of the pilot in Delhi NCR. CarDekho.com will extend this service to multiple dealer partners across the country in the coming months.

CarDekho.com currently runs one of India’s largest used car classifieds platform – helping customers discover a used car of their choice and enabling sellers to reach out to more buyers. It also launched CarDekho Trustmark certification and warranty to ensure buyers can purchase car with complete peace of mind and has inspected over 2 lakh plus vehicles till now. The launch of digital used car loan platform is another step to create a more robust used car ecosystem in the India.