Frictionless credit helped cut operational cost to lenders: RBI's Choudhary

Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2023, Choudhary spoke of the importance of customer centricity and governance to ensure the sustainability of fintech entities

The launch of the Public Tech Platform for frictionless credit has helped reduce certain operational costs to lenders by more than 70 per cent, Ajay Kumar Choudhary, executive director at the Reserve Bank of India, said on Thursday.

He said this had also eliminated any additional charges incurred by the borrowers.

On August 17, the Reserve Bank of India launched the pilot project of frictionless credit in a bid to facilitate seamless flow of required digital information to lenders. The end-to-end digital platform will have open architecture, open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and standards, to which all financial sector players can connect seamlessly in a ‘plug and play’ model. 

At the Global Fintech Fest 2023, Choudhary spoke of the importance of customer centricity and governance to ensure the sustainability of fintech entities. “Possible thrust needed for sustainability is putting the right emphasis on customer centricity and governance aspects. In any sphere, sustainability can be achieved by a balancing act, balancing between the needs of tomorrow and the wants of today,” he said. 

He reiterated the regulator’s stance on the need to establish self-regulatory organisations for fintechs, which can be set up in a gradual and risk-proportionate manner. These regulations can be rule-based, principle-based, or outcome-based, and need to be supported by a supervisory framework that will identify the outlier and take corrective actions at an early stage, he said.