Peer-to-peer lending platform Faircent has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Aarin Capital, a fund led by Infosys’ former CFO and chairman of Manipal Global Education T.V. Mohandas Pai, according to the Economic Times’ ET Tech, citing people aware of the development. Pai will also join the board of Faircent as advisor, they said.
Though he declined to comment on the exact amount that Pai has invested, Faircent’s founder and COO Vinay Mathews said,
Pai would be on the advisory board and had also made investment in the firm.
Mathews also noted that the former director of Infosys would ensure the leadership in credit appraisal technology and mobile. Industry experts cited in the ET Tech story said that “the fund is a token amount and that this is the first time Pai is investing in a fin tech marketplace.”
Pai and his former Infosys colleague V. Balakrishnan applied for permits to operate a small finance bank and payments bank earlier this year, but did not reach the Reserve Bank of India’s final list, noted ET Tech. According to Pai, Faircent has helped created access for an underserved market with little credit access, and has also decreased the cost of capital for individuals and businesses through the platform’s unique reverse auction engine.
Rajat Gandhi, chief executive of Faircent, said,
We are empowering every individual with surplus money to reach out to borrowers. This will bring down the cost of capital for borrowers.
Faircent has come up with proprietary technology to make possible credit appraisal and borrower rating systems in India. This past year, the P2P platform has been in the news for its announced alliances with TransUnion, a global credit and information management solutions provider, and Yodlee, a U.S.-based leading cloud-based technology and applications platform for digital financial services. The company also raised $250,000 in pre-Series-A funding this summer.
With over 15,000 borrowers and 3,000 lenders, Faircent has deployments and commitments over Rs 3 crore from individual lenders using the marketplace. Expressing confidence in Faircent’s future, Pai stated,
We expect Faircent to become the leader in the lending marketplace by using mobile technologies to have unparalleled outreach as compared with its peers.