Home Credit India, a local arm of international consumer credit provider Home Credit with operations spanning Europe and Asia, plans to roll out a new consumer mobile app in the coming months for the Indian market, Vivek said. Sinha, Marketing Director. .
“We are replacing our current consumer app with a new app. What we’re doing is improving our current consumer app, which is now more of a service app for our current consumers. In the current app, customers can apply for a personal loan or manage their existing loans. We will increase engagement with us in the new app,” Sinha told BusinessLine here.
He pointed out that Home Credit India, which is among the leading consumer credit providers in the country, goes beyond loans in the proposed new mobile application. The idea is to make purchasing durable consumer goods transparent, and technical pilots on the new app are underway for four cities.
“It will be a shopping app where the loan will be a way for consumers to buy what they want to buy. Customers can come to the app to see what options are out there. It’s not a great app. It’s a completely different proposition. We are in constant contact with customers and we are developing it as they would like to have it and not as we would like to give it to customers,” added Sinha.
Currently, Home Credit India has two consumer apps – one consumer app with basic service functionality and the other on HC Money (co-branded with Mobikwik). The HC Money app will continue even after the launch of the new consumer app. Currently, Home Credit India has about 1.5 million monthly app users.
Major partnerships
Sinha said Home Credit India will announce major partnerships in the next three months, especially with mobile OEMs and some technology companies to expand its reach. “It will be a kind of partnership that will help us expand our reach by 40-50% in terms of the number of outlets. “We partner with big players and integrate our lending system into their system. So when customers come to the stores, they won’t depend on our employees for the loan application. Partners can put that into their own system, they can loan out on our behalf and acquire the customer. This will help OEMs increase their sales,” he said.
Home Credit India, which became profitable in 2019, recently changed its customer acquisition model by removing the concept of sales agents/associates and moving to a partner-driven model. The idea is that partners will get the digital solution and they themselves can onboard customers and extend credit on behalf of Home Credit, Sinha said.
At the same time, the company has no plans to scrap the POS system, which is the primary source of customer acquisition, he added. To date, the company has approximately 58,000 points of contact as points of sale. “Our core strength – the POS system is not going away. We are going with more OEMs and tech players as partners. The change we are bringing is the partner people instead of our people,” he said. -he declares.
Impact of Covid19
Asked about the impact of Covid19 on Home CreditIndia’s operations, Sinha said that Covid had impacted the entire industry. “We weren’t the exception either. First wave of Covid, no one was prepared – we handled the situation very well. The second wave had derailed the recovery in demand. The market has now recovered. The number of lending industries has returned to pre-Covid19 levels. Omicron hasn’t had much of an impact on the economy and consumer sustainability lending. The third wave did not cause a loss of demand,” he added. Sinha pointed out that Home Credit India was trying to become more digital even before Covid19 and the pandemic made it think harder and “so we put the accelerator on digitalization of services. Almost everything we do comes with a digital first approach. We have also digitized merchant onboarding.”
Published on
January 27, 2022