Square Yards forays into fintech with mortgage arm Square Capital

India's largest real estate transaction platform Square Yards announced its aggressive investing in technology for its mortgage advisory platform-Square Capital with an aim to become the largest online to offline (O2O) loan aggregator in India.

Square Capital was started more than a year ago to capture the captive home loan business originating from Square Yards' real estate transactions but it soon expanded itself to get external independent business and steadily grew to be one of the largest distributor for mortgage industry in India.

It has facilitated disbursement of loans worth Rs. 1550 crore through its tie-ups with more than 45 banking partners.

Now the company is scaling up this business through the use of technology and has introduced a number of new innovations to integrate the end to end value chain in the loan segment. It also announced the launch of its new portal squarecapital.co.in that aims to take the entire loan borrowing process online starting form lead origination, credit evaluation, helping customers choose the right product from the appropriate lending organization, getting online KYC and documentation, application login, sanctions and right through loan disbursal.

"Square Capital has been one of the fastest growing and the most profitable business for Square Yards and we want to replicate our success in real estate to the fintech industry with an aim to become largest online to offline (O2O) loan aggregator and facilitator in India," said Founder and CEO Square Yards, Tanuj Shori.

"We will be soon adding all categories of loans and financial products to our portfolio. We are also significantly ramping up our connector network to increase distribution reach to a larger base of customers. We aim to be the leader in all segments of the value chain - online and assisted online, direct business advisory and connector loan syndication business," said Principal Partner and Business Head Square Capital, Indrajit Sidhanta.

The company differentiates itself by focusing the on disbursement model rather than a mere lead generation model and it is in process of integrating its systems with those of banks' backend systems in order to reduce the turnaround time for the customers while lowering the cost of customer acquisition for financial institutions.

The online and offline component of the fulfillment varies with the level of integration with bank for each category of loan.

The fintech sector is rising rapidly worldwide, and India is emerging as a hub for fintech startups. It has also seen a lot of interest from investors and venture capital funds which have pumped in huge amounts of money in this sector.

The number of fintech startups funded in the first half of 2016 equals the total number of startups funded in the sector in 2015. Even the Indian government with its Start up India program has given a push to this sector which is poised to grow exponentially well in future.