Mobile solution helps Religare Finvest streamline debt collection

Religare Finvest, a subsidiary of Religare Enterprises, is a Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) financing focused NBFC. The company provides debt capital to power the growth of the SMEs, as well as runs a retail capital markets financing business which includes loan against marketable securities.

With the growth of easy financing options, along with the company’s wide and varied customer base, Religare Finvest was facing dynamic operational challenges in debt collection. As the company relied on manual processes, there were constant delays in data updation due to teams working out of various geographies. Also, data validation was a challenge as paper trail tracking was a cumbersome and time-consuming task.

“We felt the need to improve our debt collection activities through the adoption of the latest technologybased  systems and processes. Also, we wanted to build a long-term formidable business on a robust and stable IT platform, which could cater to customer acquisition, servicing, and collections,” says Rajesh Bhatia, Senior Vice President & Head of Information Technology, Religare Finvest , highlighting the business need.

Accordingly, Religare Finvest decided to opt for a mobile application and after evaluating various solutions decided to go for Nucleus Software’s FinnOne mCollect. By implementing the mobile application, the company has created a fast, efficient and a paperless system, empowering the collection agents to access the much needed.

REALIZING THE MOBILITY ADVANTAGE

The deployment of the mobile application has enabled Religare Finvest to address concerns associated with traditional processes, as well as provided value-adds like higher security features and multiple OS support. With its traditional manual and paper-based collection system, the company was encountering inefficiencies, which resulted in delays and errors. Receipt books based on manual inputs resulted in errors like wrong agreement number, ineligible data, etc. Further, a manual Excel-based tracking for collections mechanism was used with paper-based receipts, which was a tedious process, prone to errors.

The implementation of FinnOne mCollect has enabled a virtually paperless operation therefore eliminating the need for managing receipt books. Also, users now have access to an instant MIS to track the cash collected and follow-up schedule. Chances of collection have increased significantly as queries raised by customers can be addressed instantly in contrast to earlier situations where such unresolved queries were leading to delays.

With the deployment of the mobile application, Religare Finvest has also been able to address the risk of float money in collectors’ hands due to the unpredictable time taken by collection agencies to physically deposit cash. As collections and debt management is now automated, streamlined, and real time there is improved efficiency in terms of actual collections done and control on float money. This has in turn enhanced collectors’ confidence and organization’s brand value.

“FinnOne mCollect has seen over 90% penetration across our field collector team with over 25,000 payments collected through this mobility solution. In monetary terms, the per receipt cost has come down to just 30% of prior expenses,” informs Bhatia.

In addition, the turnaround time in delivering SOA/FC has been reduced from 5-7 days to zero due to the online features, and further improvement is expected in the future.  Understanding the immense power of mobility, Religare Finvest now plans to use mobile solutions to transform its other processes, such as customer self-servicing, sales, and service enablement.