Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending (Part 1)

You’ve read our coverage of online lending vendors like Kabbage, OnDeck, Lending Club, etc. Here, we cover a story of how ALL online lending vendors (including banks) will soon become much more customer-centric, equipped with technology for fast decision-making and rapid processing of loan applications. Important trends in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Snehal Fulzele: I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Cloud Lending Solutions. Our vision is to simplify lending for the borrowers. We are a cloud-based technology platform that offers a suit of applications that digitize end-to-end lending operations, be it origination or underwriting.

Sramana Mitra: Your customers then are banks that provide lending?

Snehal Fulzele: Our customers are any institution that gives out loans. They could be banks or even alternate finance companies like Lending Point. They use our technology infrastructure to manage their lending operations.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me first about the trends of the industry that you are working with. Particularly in the lending operations, what are you seeing? What’s happening?

Snehal Fulzele: It all really started in 2008 with the global financial services meltdown. I was almost always very obsessed with the impact of micro-finance at the bottom of the pyramid. I am of the opinion that having access to financial services is a basic human right. Half of the world’s population doesn’t have that. Probably the top 20% to 30% of the top of the pyramid has access to all the formal banking services.

Through Cloud Lending, we envision to enable the middle to bottom of the pyramid to have access to formal banking services. We were looking for opportunities around how to enable financial inclusion using technology. In 2008, banks lost their appetite and they left a void. A lot of alternate financing companies were lending to people whom traditional banks won’t lend to.

A great example is SoFi. SoFi is a leading FinTech company in the US and they lend to graduates. People who come to the US and who perhaps go to Harvard or Stanford but don’t have access to credit. SoFi is tackling that problem. Post crisis, a lot of the alternate companies were born. Even today, that trend continues. We, at Cloud Lending, realize that there is an opportunity to enable these forward-thinking entrepreneurs and organizations to realize their vision. We are just an enabling technology to make that happen.

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down on maybe two or three of your customers and talk us through what you do for them? These things that you brought up, how does what you have to offer address those issues?

Snehal Fulzele: Let me also talk about the key industries with which we align ourselves with. What’s been happening over the last five years or so is companies such as Lending Club and OnDeck have transformed the user experience for the borrowers. It includes a very simplified loan application. It may include a product recommendation engine.

A borrower may come to an online lending website and apply for one type of loan. As a lender,  you may have recommendations based on what you know about the borrower. That ties down to how you use other third-party data sources to dig more about your customer or your borrower. All of that entails user experience. More and more finance companies want to include their borrower’s experience while interacting with the organization.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending
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