Semi-finalist

Last Updated June 25, 2023

Financial Inclusion Challenge

RightProfile™

Team Leader

Shyam Modi

Solution Overview & Team Lead Details

Our Organization

Syntellect India Private Limited

What is the name of your solution?

RightProfile™

Provide a one-line summary of your solution.

RightProfile™ is the flagship product which empowers lenders to lend to the unbanked and credit-invisible individuals in an informal cash economy, thereby expanding their access to financial services. Fueled by cutting-edge technology and machine learning to accurately rationalize risk for lenders.

Film your elevator pitch.

What specific problem are you solving?

Problem: By 2030, the UN-Habitat estimates that 3 billion people, about 40 percent of the world’s population, will need access to adequate housing. This translates into a demand for 96,000 new affordable and accessible housing units every day. Additionally, an estimated 100 million people worldwide are homeless and one in four people live in harmful conditions that to their health, safety, and prosperity.

Despite the burgeoning demand for affordable housing, low-income families around the world are largely underserved by housing markets. Shut out by the income requirements of the mortgage sector and unable to afford high-quality building materials and services, they build their homes incrementally, often with poor advice and substandard materials.

Lending Challenges: Globally, financial institutions find it challenging to lend to underserved/informal customers due to a lack of data points and documentation. Lenders have a manual lending process, with credit decisions driven by lender resources who heavily rely on credit reports and banking history, making lending discretionary, often subjective, and paper-based leading to the systematic exclusion of lower-income groups.

Access to credit is a major source of poverty alleviation in many developing countries around the world, this could potentially be a major factor that prevents them from growing the scope of their livelihood and achieving better performance. On a larger scale, access to credit would uplift economic growth and create the potential for employment generation.

Reasons Why Conventional Lending Approaches Don’t Work:

Current Approaches suited for customers with a credit history

Current credit assessment methods are bureau dependent.
Inaccurate representation for New to Bureau and New to Credit.
Inefficient processes.

Undocumented Income

Curation of Income is difficult.
Based on the lender’s resources understanding which can be limited and unlikely to be based on the full extent of existing data held by the lending institution

Subjective Assessment

Impossible for credit officers to interlink and assess across data points.
The cost of error is very high.
Inordinate manual effort.

Lack of Understanding of customer business & Personal Nuances

Heterogeneous customer segment with unique business nuances.
Incomplete assessment results in incorrect loan sizing and risk profiling.
Lack of business insights leads to poor portfolio build.

Legacy Manual Underwriting

Current customer data is captured manually and is anecdotal. Non-standard customer data is captured manually in forms and/or with no data trail.
The complete absence of standardized, predictive, scalable forward-looking data points.

What is your solution?

Introduction

RightProfile™ is an innovative, intelligent on-field underwriting platform that uses advanced analytics and machine learning to re-imagine credit assessment for this unique customer segment. RightProfile™ is founded on domain expertise, fueled by technology, and centered around a deep understanding of the underserved customer segments.

Unique Value Propositions of RightProfile™:

Inventive customer profiling and loan underwriting tool: RightProfile™ gives decision intelligence to lenders through data acquisition and evaluation based on their income, geographic location, family structure, and loan feasibility strength.
RightProfile™ leverages alternative data to support the informal sector: The platform leverages domain experience and data to bring together industry-specific templates and credit assessment algorithms, segmented by income type and nature of business.
Leverages Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI): To further simplify the loan application, providing lenders with an exhaustive report outlining loan recommendations and risk profiles instead of a singular credit score which is often based on a subjective assessment of risk. The platform leverages AI, ML, statistics, specialized programming, and advanced analytics to uncover actionable insights and provide intelligence to lenders based on multiple parameters.
Fuelled by domain expertise: Tailored specifically for the credit invisible, RightProfile™ addresses nuances with a unique data capture methodology. It automates the borrowing process while digitizing data in a uniform manner.
RightProfile™ is customizable and can align with specific lender policies: The tool can be customized to meet lending institutions’ specific requirements and absolutely align with lender policies without having to undergo major changes at the organizational level.

The core components of RightProfile™:

1. RightProfile™ UX

An Angularjs app that represents the UI for the PD and credit person. This app is being used to input the required data used for profiling

2. RightProfile™ core/services

This component represents the Rest API microservices for profiling generating reports and notification

3. RightProfile™ Scheduler

This component represents a scheduling engine that starts the job of profiling and report generation activities.

4. RightProfile™ Profiler

This component represents the Profiling engine. This takes the application and runs the rules around it to determine deviations and generated the score.

5. RightProfile™ Report

This component represents the reporting engine. The tool generates the pdf using Phantomjs.

Technologies Used in RightProfile

Tech stack: RightProfile™ Main Product

1. JDK 1.8

2. Postgres database

3. AngularJS and Angular for front-end development

4. MicroServices

5. Apache Tomcat

6. Virtual Environment for Python

7. nginx

8. phantomjs-2.1.1

Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?

Problem Addressed

RightProfile™ addresses the issues caused by legacy conventional underwriting processes and mitigates financial exclusion of the underbanked/underserved segment. By giving a significant sector of society access to potential sources of end-user finance, RightProfile is assisting in the creation of a source of unlocked affordable housing demand.

Our mission is to expand Financial Access for the underserved customer, Automate and add intelligence to the borrowing process through RightProfile™ and consistently highlight the significant, immediate productivity gain in automating manual, person-driven legacy underwriting approaches.

1. How does RightProfile™ benefit the low-income customer segment?

Expands Access
Helps create a digital persona that aids lenders to lend.
Eliminates inaccurate representation of their financial status for future analytics and insights.
Reduces the perceived risk held by lending institutions with respect to the unbanked, informal income sector of society.

2. How does RightProfile™ benefit lenders?

Identifies valued customers within the priority sector.
Accurately rationalizes risk for the sector focusing on affordable housing and thin-file individuals.
Assists loan officers through every decision by giving geolocation, business/income validation insights, and policy/compliance alerts. Therefore, minimizing the scope of human error and misjudgment.
Creates advanced credit risk assessment report derived through the comprehensive 3-dimensional assessment document that focuses on financial status, business profile, and personal standing.
Improves the qualitative and quantitative data held by the lender and maximizes the use of that data by proving a level of analytics that would previously not have been possible or would have taken a significant amount of resources to interrogate.

3. How does RightProfile™ impact underwriting?

By standardizing the underwriting process, we ensure that key data points are always asked and all data is archived on one platform.

RightProfile™ does the following -

Expands access to financial services.
Addresses misguided loan eligibility.
Digitizes the personas of low-income customers for future analytics and lending insights.
Bring access to real-time live dashboards.
Quantification of portfolio risk.

How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?

About Founder CEO: Sumedha Salunkhe Naik

RightProfile™ Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion spirit is reflected in our workspace.

Syntellect is founded by a woman.
Has generational representation right from Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials to Generation Z across the functions of technology, finance/compliance, product and data science.

Sumedha Salunkhe Naik is an established mortgage strategist, business enabler and executor with over 20 years of experience in enabling the business to succeed. Expert in aligning lending processes across diverse and complex business environments including start-ups, high growth and downturn. Adept at cross-functional change management in lending organizations, Digital Underwriting transformation projects and Lending Acceptance Infrastructure:

Domain Expertise: Affordable Housing ▪ Understanding of the underserved affordable housing customer ▪ Intelligent technology enabled credit decisioning ▪ Design of credit lending acceptance infrastructure: Policy and processes ▪ Digitization of processes ▪ Contribution to SDG ▪ Product development for the nano entrepreneur ▪ Enabling technology for lending ▪ Stakeholder management

Distribution Channels

Given that RightProfile™ is a B2B product and an impact tech solution provider, there are myriad distribution channels. We have detailed them below

UK-based Reall, UK’s largest investor in affordable housing is Syntellect’s marquee investor. Our marquee investor is a strategic partner and is committed to the affordable housing sector and financial inclusion. Link - https://reall.net/
- (Reall’s credibility and footprint in the global markets, help us demonstrate our capability and potential.)
Reall and RightProfile™ have received endorsement from The Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance for the pilot in Kenya. RightProfile™ is an automated credit assessment tool.
Affiliations with Multilateral organizations to demonstrate expertise: Empaneled as experts with World Bank and IFC.
- IFC Validation: India & South Asia: Affordable Housing Finance: Business Model & Process Specialist.
Signed MOUs with Impact Organizations: Latin America, Kenya.

Participating in speaking engagements for visibility:
- Lead Speaker at the World Bank event 2022 for the Latin American market titled “Increasing access to mortgages for informal/low-income households through new technologies”. The case of Syntellect in India.
- Speaker and Panelist at the World Urban Forum 11 held in Katowice, Poland: Discussions
  - "Unlocking Affordable Housing Markets through a data revolution" and "Effective Approaches to Affordable Housing for All".
  - Discussions revolved around the power of data for expanding access and how RightProfile addresses this very need.
- Panelist at the Eight Asia Pacific Housing Forum 2021: Panelist on the Use of financial technology solutions to expand access to affordable housing.
Awards to demonstrate capability:
- Founder CEO awarded Fintech Women Entrepreneur Award by Business World: Leading Business Publication.
- Awarded with Fintech Women Entrepreneur Award by Business World in January 2019.
- Recognized among the top 10 women entrepreneurs making waves in the fintech space in 2019.

Which dimension of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Provide new ways to accurately assess credit-worthiness of MSMEs and individuals, including methods that reduce bias against borrowers who have traditionally lacked equitable access to credit

In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?

Mumbai, Maharashtra.

In what country is your solution team headquartered?

India

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model that is rolled out in one or more communities

How many people does your solution currently serve?

RightProfile™ is licensed to lenders and our impact is through the lenders and multilateral organizations. Our core business activity is the sale of a non-exclusive license to deploy RightProfile™ on their server.

India

RightProfile™ is currently live in India, having profiled 14,000 customers and 5,169 nano-merchants. RightProfile™ has capabilities to scale globally and we aim to extend its reach into Africa. We are supported by our investors and partner Reall, a pioneer in the affordable housing industry.

We work with 2 of the largest affordable housing lenders in India. We have also worked with a large payments bank.

Africa & Latin America

In May 2023, we sent a proposal to one of Kenya's largest microfinance bank.
MOU is being signed with a large impact player for RightProfile entry in Latin America.

Why are you applying to Solve?

Support sought

Platform to reach key lenders/stakeholders across our markets
- (Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America)
Support for customization and localization of RightProfile™
Reputational Alignment
Subsidy for lenders to trial RightProfile™
Access to Funding and Investment Support
- Customisation and/or localisation
- Technical assistance
- Business development

We would seek support to connect with key lenders/stakeholders to address their underwriting challenges and an opportunity to showcase the benefits of RightProfile™.

Access leadership coaching and strategic advice from experts in the Solve and MIT networks.

Join a powerful network of impact-minded leaders across industries and sectors.
Receive monitoring and evaluation support to build an impact measurement practice.
Gain exposure in the media and at conferences.
Access relevant in-kind resources such as software licenses and legal services from Solve supporters.

We are seeking funding support in the following areas: -

We are looking at raising series A capital to the tune of 3-5 million USD. Together we can catalyze change, scale efforts, and make lending accessible by creating a level lending playing field.

In which of the following areas do you most need partners or support?

Business Model (e.g. product-market fit, strategy & development)
Financial (e.g. accounting practices, pitching to investors)
Product / Service Distribution (e.g. delivery, logistics, expanding client base)
Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media)

Who is the Team Lead for your solution?

Founder CEO: Sumedha Salunkhe Naik

More About Your Solution

What makes your solution innovative?

Unique Value Propositions of RightProfile™:

Inventive customer profiling and loan underwriting tool: RightProfile™ gives decision intelligence to lenders through data acquisition and evaluation based on their income, geographic location, family structure, and loan feasibility strength.
RightProfile™ leverages alternative data to support the informal sector: The platform leverages domain experience and data to bring together industry-specific templates and credit assessment algorithms, segmented by income type and nature of business.
Leverages Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI): To further simplify the loan application, providing lenders with an exhaustive report outlining loan recommendations and risk profiles instead of a singular credit score which is often based on a subjective assessment of risk. The platform leverages AI, ML, statistics, specialized programming, and advanced analytics to uncover actionable insights and provide intelligence to lenders based on multiple parameters. Examples:-
1. Predictive Income modeling
2. Predictive Default modeling
3. Image recognition
4. Geolocation Capture and Location Intelligence
Fuelled by domain expertise: Tailored specifically for the credit invisible, RightProfile™ addresses nuances with a unique data capture methodology. It automates the borrowing process while digitizing data in a uniform manner.
RightProfile™ is customizable and can align with specific lender policies: The tool can be customized to meet lending institutions’ specific requirements and absolutely align with lender policies without having to undergo major changes at the organizational level.

What are your impact goals for the next year and the next five years, and how will you achieve them?

Vision

In the next five years, RightProfile endeavors to expand access to the credit-invisible, new to credit, informal sector customers in the markets of:

Asia
Sub-Saharan Africa
Latin America

By 2030, UN-Habitat estimates that 3 billion people, about 40 percent of the world’s population, will need access to adequate housing. This translates into a demand for 96,000 new affordable and accessible housing units every day. Additionally, an estimated 100 million people worldwide are homeless and one in four people live in harmful conditions that to their health, safety and prosperity.

These are the individuals we want to RightProfile, expand access to and help move them into their own homes.

RightProfile is aligned with 6 Sustainable Development Goals:

No Poverty
Gender Equality
Decent Work and Economic Growth
Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
Reduced Inequalities
Sustainable Cities and Communities

Which of the UN Sustainable Development Goals does your solution address?

1. No Poverty
5. Gender Equality
8. Decent Work and Economic Growth
9. Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure
10. Reduced Inequalities
11. Sustainable Cities and Communities

How are you measuring your progress toward your impact goals?

RightProfile™ Progress Indicators
1. Rationale
2. Impact with RightProfile™
3. Figures Indicating access expanded

1. Rationale

The total number of RightProfile™ generated.

Prior to RightProfile™

A large portion of the informal underserved applicants were systemically excluded due to poor of understanding of customer business and a lack of documentation

Impact with RightProfile™

Significant percentage increase in financial inclusion of the underserved helping lenders expand access to this unique customer segment.

2. Rationale

Intelligent Underwriting and Decisioning progress
Equipping lender loan officers with the right questions to access the credit-invisible and underserved

Prior to RightProfile™

Completely Absent.

Data collection ad hoc and manually driven by the loan officer

Impact with RightProfile™

RightProfile™ User Interface provides pre-templated curated questions for the underbanked customer with specific Trade questions as well.

3. Rationale

Intelligent standard loan decisioning

The decision is completely driven by the loan officer and is a function of his/her training.

Prior to RightProfile™
Absence of standardization and/or a scientific approach.

Impact with RightProfile™

RightProfile provides a loan decisioning output as well as a customer profile number from 1 to 10 which indicates where the customer stands on a loan repayment risk scale.

4. Rationale
Turnaround time reduce substantially. Eg – Decisioning time 25 days to 3 days)
Reduce multiple handovers and fatigue. Standardized customer assessment outputs - Lender

Prior to RightProfile™

Absent. Currently Captured in various modes. This caused inefficiency and errors.

1. Handwritten notes
2. Word/ Excel documents

Impact with RightProfile™
RightProfile™ report is a digital standardized output generated for each and every customer which provides a decisioning insight along with multiple other intelligent outputs.

5. Rationale
Increase efficiency & Productivity for the underwriter & Quantification of the Portfolio.

Prior to RightProfile™
Absent. Complete absence of standardized customer profiling

Impact with RightProfile™

Granular customer profiling leads to exhaustive portfolio assessment.

6. Rationale

Live Portfolio Dashboards and Insights

Prior to RightProfile™
Absent. Given that data points are collected manually and are not digitized, there is no feed for intelligent analytics.

Impact with RightProfile™
RightProfile™ dashboards are available in real-time to interested stakeholders and can be customized and can be drilled down to any granularity required.

What is your theory of change?

Generic & long-term challenges addressed by RightProfile

Impact Indicators of RightProfile™

Objective

Empowers lenders to lend to the unbanked, low-income and credit-invisible individuals in an informal cash economy, by expanding their access to financial services.

Challenges

Address the issues caused by legacy conventional underwriting processes and mitigates financial exclusion of the underbanked/underserved segment. By giving a significant sector of society access to potential sources of end-user finance, RightProfile is assisting in the creation of a source of unlocked affordable housing demand.

Mission

1. Expand Financial Access for the underserved customer.

Automate and add intelligence to the borrowing process through RightProfile™ and consistently highlight the significant, immediate productivity gain in automating manual, person-driven legacy underwriting approaches.

2. Short-Term Process Challenges Addressed

RightProfile's proprietary User Interface enables lenders to capture critical, scalable, forward-looking, quantifiable data points specific to the underserved customer segment.

These data points are then converted by our AI machine-learning models into usable lending insights.

Customer data is unorganized and therefore lenders are currently unable to identify unique customer characteristics and behavior patterns.

RightProfile addresses the following challenges below in the short-term resulting in increased efficiencies, productivity and lesser cost of customer acquisition at the same time while expanding access and creating robust portfolios:

The Current manual underwriting process involves capturing customer data points in Excel spreadsheets and as open remarks in Loan Origination Systems.
Data and financial entry are therefore time-consuming and lack uniformity
Data entered into the Excel spreadsheet is re-entered directly into Altum Credo’s core systems, doubling effort and creating duplicate records of the same data
From a storage, lineage, retrieval, and portfolio insight perspective, this method has serious flaws.
Back and forth with the borrower for required data points/information as required by seniors.

Describe the core technology that powers your solution.

RightProfile™ UX

An Angularjs app that represents the UI for the PD and credit person. This app is being used to input the required data used for profiling

RightProfile™ core/services

This component represents the Rest API microservices for profiling generating reports and notification

RightProfile™ Scheduler

This component represents a scheduling engine that starts the job of profiling and report generation activities.

RightProfile™ Profiler

This component represents the Profiling engine. This takes the application and runs the rules around it to determine deviations and generated the score.

RightProfile™ Report

This component represents the reporting engine. The tool generates the pdf using Phantomjs.

RightProfile™: Income Estimator Model

Since many applicants do not have the necessary documents to verify income. It is crucial to ensure that that income is not overstated by the applicant to get higher loan eligibility. Hence we created an income estimator model.

Income estimator AI model that effectively captures and analyzes customers' data corresponding to several features in the loan application. Then predicts the income of the applicant using those data points.

Data fields used to train ML model: 32 columns (Around 44,000 data points across 14 states/regions in India). Takes Industry, financial and business-level input data.

RightProfile™: Default Estimator Model

Objective: To develop a dynamic affordable home loan management system that adjusts the interest rates, credit limits, or recovery actions for borrowers based on their credit history and loan performance, with the objective of maximizing the total revenue collected by the financial institution while minimizing the risk of default and financial inclusion.

RightProfile™: Computer Vision Model and Geotagging

RightProfile has inbuilt features to capture the geolocation and address of a given location. This is important to authenticate the business or employer premise of the borrower applicant and accurately assess the business potential.

Our computer vision model essentially helps to detect revenue-generating equipment and items in any given image. To evaluate the business potential and revenue-generating ability of the business.

Which of the following categories best describes your solution?

A new technology

How do you know that this technology works?

Covered by RightProfile™:Case Study

The following is a case study illustrating the On-Boarding Process and underwriting of an Informal Home Loan Customer in India.

*Informal refers to the underbanked/unbanked

Personal Discussion Stages

Potential customer met at the place of Business / Employer.
Lender resource initiates questions, questions are administered ad hoc, and responses are captured and handwritten in a notebook.
The Lender sales resource then proceeds to the office at the end of the day / next day and inputs this data into an Excel file.

Observations

Data was collected in an unstructured manner. They do not adhere to a standard format.
Data points captured manually on paper during Personal Discussion are not completely reflected in the Excel output. Refer to the Data Capture Comparison table for more details.
Critical data fields are not asked for. Data in a non-digitized format is almost impossible to use for predictive analysis.

In our visit to Nairobi in the month of April 2023. Our observation was that the process was similar to the legacy process being followed in India.

RightProfile™ Vs Legacy Manual Process

What separates RightProfile™ proprietary User Interface from other Loan Origination Systems is that our proprietary User Interface asks for critical standardized customer data points that Lender Excel documents (CAMs) were unable to capture.

The following are the parameters considered: -

Input Data Parameter
Lender Systems
RightProfile™

1. Current Residence (in yrs)