Inspiration

We think that people from all financial backgrounds should have access to the same opportunities and formal credit. The idea for this came from the impact the pandemic had on the migrant worker community and the recent suicides by persons involved in the farm sector in rural India. Most of these people didn't have access to formal credit and had to rely on their friends and family for financial support which was never formally recorded.

What it does

Our platform has a three step approach to solving this problem, the first documents existing peer to peer transactions to start building an in-platform credit score. The 2nd, introduces a digital marketplace that connects lenders and borrowers from different peer groups together demonstrating lending and borrowing behavior across a wider network. This additional data layer will help to make the credit score more robust. The 3rd, allows banks to use the in platform credit score as a metric to offer bank loans to users via the digital marketplace.

How we built it

We used design thinking framework to come up with our business Idea. We conducted multiple user interviews to better understand the market and conducted affinity mapping exercises to synthesize our insights. We also created a user persona that we could empathize with. This led us to our first customer journey map from which our core features began to evolve. By analyzing pain points and gains we were able to come up with our product offering. Then we began flesh out our idea using pen and paper and created lo-fi prototypes which we tested with our user group. We then refined these into a digital prototype and did a second round of user testing . We used Figma to build out our prototype.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Finding a value proposition that is mutually beneficial to both people in need for formal credit and to the formal financial institutions. By using our custom credit score and our digital marketplace, banks can significantly reduce the amount of costs associated with data collection for loan decisioning and customer acquisition.

What we learned

  1. We learned that people from low income communities were already lending and borrowing within their community especially between friends and family. However there was no digital footprint documenting these transactions.

  2. We learned that although our user group wasn't aware of the benefits of formally tracking financial data in a systematic manner. They were managing their finances in their own informal way very well. We were able to gauge that creating a digital footprint of this data would go a long way in building a credit score for them in the future. When we explained the benefits of documenting the data they seemed excited about such a platform. So we implemented features to aid them in this process.

  3. We learned that there is a huge change in how people feel about digital transactions after the introduction of unified payment interface in India. And most people were already using digital payment apps.

What's next for Qualify - Growth Simplified

We have a 4 phase implementation strategy, we have already completed stage 1 and tested out prototype of peer - peer transactions with the focus group, the 2nd phase is to Test prototype of digital marketplace with an expanded focus group, Using these two data points along with other undocumented financial data for our users we want to create and refine our credit score algorithm and get banks to sign up to be a part of the digital market place and the final phase would be to launch the app.

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