Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: One thing that I find curious is that you have 85 customers and they are all online lenders. How many online lenders are there right now?

Snehal Fulzele: We are a global company. Half of our customers are in the US. It started in the UK and US, and we are seeing a lot of online lending in countries like China. There are about 3,000 companies in China. It’s happening in Australia. If you add the crowdfunding platforms in the US alone, there are about 400 of them, which spans across not only loans, but also equity platforms as well.

Sramana Mitra: You don’t just deal with lending. You also deal with equity crowdfunding due diligence?

Snehal Fulzele: Not yet. We’re focused on lending right now. Our goal, however, is to expand. The biggest trend that we’re seeing is more traditional finance companies are wanting to provide a fintech kind of user experience.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Does your platform then have specific features to work in this crowd financing mode? If you’re doing lending due diligence at the back end of a crowd financing company, do you have features to deal with crowd financing environment?

Snehal Fulzele: We have a product module called Marketplace which links the borrowers or the loan applications with multiple retail or institutional investors who are wanted to invest in that particular loan application or borrower. It’s a many-to-many relationship. There’s complexity involved not only in terms of lending but also when you receive payments from the borrower and it needs to be split to whoever has participated in the loan in the manner it was agreed upon. That particular module takes care of that. We have over 20 marketplace lending platforms that are using our technology.

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in terms of what the lending criteria are? For example, if you look at OnDeck or Kabbage, the focus is on a certain number of transactions or a certain volume of transaction in the online e-commerce type of businesses, that’s their sweet spot. What are some of the trends you’re seeing in your 85 customers? What kinds of lending criteria are they imposing on their due diligence?

Snehal Fulzele: That’s an interesting question. I guess one of the key challenges that we are solving as a technology platform for online lenders is the ability to serve different lending models. In terms of trends, we are seeing many unique things. One is we have an example where they do franchising financing. They finance the franchises.

Their requirements would be so much different than a traditional line of credit loan. In this particular case, the requirement would be, “I want to base my underwriting algorithm on how much raw materials are being purchased because then I would have a better sense of the volume.” This is an example of a unique lending model or, at least, a lending model which is going after a niche market.

As a technology vendor, we want to make sure that our systems are flexible enough for them to configure their underwriting algorithm. Then we have a customer who’s into giving out medical loans. We have customers who do wedding loans. They look at different things. We are seeing unique lending models and our platform is able to withstand those uniqueness.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending
1 2 3 4