The Aureate Creditor Rupeek facilitates gold monetisation through an app where a customer can access various financial products on the back of their gold assets, from investment to borrowing, at the click of a button
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Although gold investment is rather popular in India, 'gold loans' are not so, in part because of the social stigma attached to pawning family heirlooms such as gold jewellery in exchange for credit.
"We are striving to change the emotional orientation of this category by challenging the status quo and providing it with an aspirational appeal. We are on a mission to make gold monetisation intuitive by providing a single app, where a customer can access various financial products on the back of their gold, from investment to borrowing, at the click of a button," states Sumit Maniyar, Founder CEO, Rupeek.
Conventional players in the gold-backed lending industry, such as banks and traditional NBFCs, rely on the brick-and-mortar model to serve credit against gold assets. "These processes are cumbersome and slow, while interest rates offered are not competitive for customers," claims Maniyar. According to him, technology is a key differentiator and enabler for Rupeek as the fintech seeks to offer a highly extensible, configurable, resilient and secure multi-asset-backed lending platform with a large network of lenders, merchants and affiliates to serve the credit needs of millions of customers. "This allows us to complete the entire loan process in around 30 minutes," he adds.
The company's future plans involve building the next set of diverse gold monetization product offerings for credit-seeking, credit-under and unserved customers; expanding its distribution to semi-urban regions in India and improving customer experience in existing markets by strengthening its branch network; understanding the gold loan appetite of other countries from an expansion perspective. Rupeek is currently operationally profitable pan-India and gearing up to achieve PAT profitability by the end of 2023, claims Maniyar.
Reflecting on the company's progress thus far, he shares, "For any leader to be successful, they should be able to not only set the right vision for the company but also be extremely effective at aligning all the stakeholders to that vision."
Factsheet:
- Amount of funding received: $140 million
- Year of inception: 2015
- Number of employees: 1000+
- No. of app downloads: 5L+
