Paisabazaar Shifts Focus To Home Loans, Aims 50% Disbursal Share

We are setting up our presence where the consumer is physically present, to provide end-to-end assistance in what usually is a long and complex process for a large set of consumers -- Sahil Arora, Chief Business Officer, Secured Loans

Hyderabad: Paisabazaar, a leading marketplace for consumer credit and free credit score platform, is strongly focusing on scaling its home loans and other secured loan products, with an aim to take the share of secured loan disbursals to 50 per cent of total disbursals through the platform. Typically, secured loans, like home loans and Loan Against Property (LAP) contributed 13 per cent-15 per cent of disbursals through Paisabazaar till last financial year. Both home loans and LAP have a massive market, with disbursals at around Rs14 lakh crore on an annualised basis, according to Paisabazaar’s internal estimates.

Naveen Kukreja, Co-founder & CEO, Paisabazaar, said, “The overall macros for India’s consumer credit market remain strong and conducive for long-term growth. For us as a business, while unsecured credit would continue to be the backbone of our growth, we also recognise a big opportunity to go deeper and scale secured loans, especially home loans. Since home loans as a category is largely offline and last-mile-driven, our focus is largely on building our distribution and fulfilment capabilities. Our strong brand and large scale would also be key drivers for us in strengthening the secured business.” Paisabazaar, currently, is focussing on Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru, which together form over 30 per cent of the total home loans market, according to its estimates. It is strengthening its FoS teams to build a strong offline presence in these three cities.

Sahil Arora, Chief Business Officer, Secured Loans, said, “We are setting up our presence where the consumer is physically present, to provide end-to-end assistance in what usually is a long and complex process for a large set of consumers. Our key focus areas are to build last mile capability, scale distribution and add genuine consumer value through wide choice, personalised and unbiased advice along with end-to-end assistance.”

As a marketplace platform, a key part of Paisabazaar’s secured growth strategy also lies in building and strengthening partnerships with Banks and HFCs across the ecosystem. While Home Loan and Loan Against Property remain largely offline businesses, Paisabazaar says that over the next couple of years, it would also work with partners to digitise certain parts of the process, which should lead to lesser leakages and better conversions.

“We saw the industry come together to build end-to-end digital processes for unsecured loans post Covid. The onus now lies with the industry to focus on building digital capabilities for secured loans. For instance, the industry should digitise the sanction process for home loans, while the property evaluation and documentation can continue to be offline,” said Naveen Kukreja.