Spice Digital, a subsidiary of Spice Mobility, has invested ₹25 crore in Hyderabad-based fintech company AnyTimeLoan that gives loans through a digital platform. Spice Digital will take a minority stake in the firm incubated at T-Hub.

The two-year-old start-up uses a proprietary algorithm using artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics to quickly check backgrounds, assess the profile and disburse loans, with no human intervention.

Using the proceeds, the firm is planning to increase disbursal volumes to ₹100 crore a month from ₹5.5 crore. “To fuel the growth, we are going to ramp up our operations by increasing the number of employees to 230 by April 2018, from the present 19. The additional workforce will be for operations, technology and customer service,” said Keerthi Kumar Jain, founder, Luharia Group, which owns the start-up.

Spice Digital provides Mobile Value Added Services (MVAS), mobile applications, and internet products and services.

“Besides the financial investments, Spice Digital can bring in its vast digital transactions base to expand our base. They record about 20 million transactions a month on their platform. We could leverage this to expand our reach.

“We have built an algorithm that does background checks using publicly available profiles — by the time you have submitted the online application, the assessment would have been completed. Our interest rates run as low as 0.05 per cent a day for personal and educational loans (to support fee payments up to Plus 2),” he said.

The fintech firm, which has so far disbursed 53,000 loans worth ₹83 crore, has showed an average return of 28.3 per cent to lenders. The default rate was put at 0.17 per cent. “We have a commitment for ₹16.4 crore from registered lenders who are mostly salaried people and professionals.

“YES Bank has started sanctioning loans using our algorithm two months ago. Another top bank is likely to adopt it,” Jain said.

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