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Bengal

Start-up sets up 5-year deadline to fund 3 lakh e-rickshaws in Bengal

Kolkata: RevFin, a digital lending start-up firm that started from March 2018, has set up a target of financing three lakh e-rickshaws in Bengal in the next five years.

The company is ready to pump in Rs 3,000 crore in the state. An e-rickshaw is priced around Rs 1.5 lakh and the firm will provide Rs 1 lakh for a single e-rickshaw, which is 75 percent of the total price.

"We started lending in October 23 last year and so far we have financed over 150 e-rickshaws across the country. We started financing in Bengal from February 16. We have offered a loan to 30 such vehicles in the state," said RevFin founder and CEO Sameer Agaarwal.

Apart from Bengal, the company provides funds to people who aspire to buy e-rickshaws in Uttarakhand, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

The company has tied up with seven manufacturers of e-vehicles across the country through which it is getting in touch with the customers. In Bengal, it has tied up with one such manufacturer based in North 24-Parganas and is exploring two similar partnerships in Kolkata. Revfin has recently started financing for e-two-wheelers as well.

The Union government has come up with a policy called FAME II (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid and Electric Vehicles) and has set a target of electrifying all public transport and public commercial vehicle by 2030. "However, availability of financing organisations is very limited in India. The public sector banks are financing for e-rickshaws in a very limited manner and the presence of private banks are confined mainly to tier III and tier IV towns. Moreover, the time frame for financing by a public sector bank takes around two months. Our app-based process takes only two days for processing a loan."

RevFin recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with IIT Kharagpur for the development of a psychometric assessment in the loan underwriting process. The purpose of the project is to provide the fintech industry with the contemporary method of underwriting a loan application by using holistic human behavior as it will complement the traditional way of looking at credit history. The innovation will calculate the borrower's intention to repay a loan by measuring their mental capabilities and behavioral style through psychometrics.

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