Indiabulls automates loan disbursal

Indiabulls Housing Finance (IBHFL) is the second largest private housing finance company in India, regulated by the National Housing Bank (NHB). It is part of the Indiabulls group, set up in 1999. Its business encompasses housing finance, real estate and wealth management. IBHFL is headquartered in Gurgaon and its corporate office is in Mumbai.  

The Challenge

Generally, home loan disbursal is a very complex and time consuming process which needs a lot of documentation, followed by verifications and credit evaluations. “There are multiple applicants for a single home loan application, so it becomes very difficult and time consuming to collect the required documents from the applicants,” says Nafees Ahmed, CIO, IBHFL.  Also, applicants sometimes submitted wrong documents, or were not available to complete the entire loan cycle.

Mistakes committed by the sales representatives of the company also added to the woes. “Many times they used to collect wrong documents from the applicants,” says Ahmed. As the documents had to be sent to the company’s various hubs for credit evaluations sometimes they simply went missing in transit. Consequently, there were delays, making the entire process painful and frustrating for the customers.

The Solution

In a bid to find a solution to these problems, Ahmed and his team decided to automate the loan disbursal process. The project, which facilitated the submission of documents online, took six months to go live.

 Once ready, the automated system required customers to electronically upload the desired documents on the company’s website. Once this is done they are provided the option of an `e-sign’. After they click on the `e-sign’, they are required to submit their respective Aadhar numbers, following which the numbers are electronically sent to Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDI) for authentication. The customers complete the authentication process through OTPs sent to their mobile phones.

The dcuments are stored on a document management system and all transactions are done in a secure environment, says Ahmed.

These documents are eventually moved to a core loan management system and are accessible to credit and operations teams to further process the applications. Earlier, the physical documents were scanned and uploaded to the system. Now everything is done electronically right from the start. The company’s website is fully integrated with the loan management system.   

The Benefits

With this project, IBHFL has been able to increase the productivity of its sales force by 50 percent. Also, the productivity of credit and operations teams has improved. Going fully electronic has also helped the company lower its carbon footprint to an extent. “On the whole, the costs have come down and productivity has gone up by notches,” concludes Ahmed.