How This Next Generation Entrepreneur Rebranded His Family's NBFC Business

Being a second generation entrepreneur is one deal, however, being the gen next in financial services business is much tougher than one could imagine.

The industry is going to a series of digital disruption where enterprises have started to realise the importance of technology and are leaving no room for mistakes. This is when the expertise of gen next entrepreneurs comes in handy as they have a tendency to think out of the box solutions.

Shantanu Agarwal is the Chief Innovation Office of Paislo Digital (formerly know S. E. Investments Limited) and the youngest son of the company's founder Sunil Agarwal. Soon after completing his internship at multiple forex exchange trading agencies in Singapore and Hong Kong, he realized the importance of technology in the financial services business.

Additionally, he understood that his experience working with the above businesses could be applied to his family's lending business and quadruple the growth of Paislo. He says, "I was faced with two choices – either to work for self or work for others. I opted the first one, and here we are today, trying to build a powerhouse in the MSME and SME lending ecosystem."

Opinion on the Ecosystem

For Shantanu Agarwal being a second generation entrepreneur is not a cake walk as his challenges are not very different from other first time entrepreneurs. He believes that the government, be it central or state, should ease their control over the entrepreneurial ecosystem and let all entrepreneur thrive.

"The lesson here for the ecosystem then is to support the entrepreneurs - small or big. Respect them. The entire country's economy is primarily running on entrepreneurs and their efforts. Don't impose arbitrary laws on them. The authorities have to realise that entrepreneur are taxpayers, job creators and not a thief," he added.

Young at Heart

Even though Paislo is a 25-year old NBFC, Agarwal says the company is young at heart just like other startups.

Talking about the rebranding of the company, Agarwal shares that "the Paisalo brand name has been chosen with thoughtful consideration to reflect the true essence of the change in the company's new digital business approach so as to create a seamless and hassle-free experience for customers. The name not only defines the business of the company but also resonates with the simplicity of the lending process. "

The CIO opines that lending companies should learn from pizza delivering companies and considering improving their turnaround timing while servicing their customers. Hence, along with rebranding, the NBFC also started to evaluate some of the new-age technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to access the creditworthiness of the SMEs

"By leveraging technology and harnessing the power of machine learning the company aims to adopt 100per cent end-to-end mobility for the entire spectrum of operations in areas such as loan origination, loan management, and repayments," he concluded.