Square Capital Emerges as the Largest Integrated Mortgage Marketplace in India

Square Capital, the digital lending marketplace arm of India’s largest real estate marketplace, Square Yards, has strengthened its market dominance by emerging as the largest organized distributor of secured mortgages in the country. The company, currently facilitates INR 300 to 350 Crores (~ USD 50mn) of total loans disbursements every month with home loans and loan against property contributing to around 75% of the overall volumes. Charting its ambitious growth plans and making strides toward rapid expansion, the company plans to further strengthen its technological and analytics capabilities to create an integrated paperless ecosystem for home loans using its strong partnerships with real estate developers, banks and NBFCs.

In the last few years, fin-tech sector in India has gained a lot of traction with an influx of players emerging in payments, lending, insurance and personal investments segments. A closer look at these tech startups reveals that most of these are focused on either personal or SME financing while no one is even attempting to disrupt the largest and most promising segment of housing finance & mortgages.

Started in 2016, to capture the captive home loan business originating from Square Yards’ real estate transactions, Square Capital soon went into an expansion spree and grew steadily, to be the largest distributor for secured mortgage industry in India. Currently, Square Capital has tie-ups with more than 65 banking & NBFC partners and it facilitates more than 800 loan transactions on a monthly basis.

Tanuj Shori, CEO & Founder of Square Yards said, “Housing finance dwarfs all other forms of retail lending by a big margin but there is no serious fin-tech player attempting to simplify it through technology. We see a big gap in the market and an opportunity for ourselves to scale this business significantly.  Facilitating a home loan mortgage transaction doesn’t only require getting through the maze of complex valuation decisions, excessive documentation and tight regulations but also deep expertise of the underlying real estate value chain. No wonder only a real estate player could have cracked this space and Square Yards is doing it with its mortgage arm, Square Capital, emerging as one of the largest integrated mortgage marketplace in the country.”

Replicating its success in the real estate world, the company follows a similar Online to Offline (O2O) approach for loans during customer acquisition and service delivery. It has unique online capabilities to provide accurate eligibility of an applicant linked to credit bureau & various banks’ product & credit policies, ability to perform e-KYC of the clients through integration with NSDL & Aadhar network and direct Integration with Banks’ loan origination systems. It has an equally strong offline sales team that provides loan advisory & end to end fulfilment support in the lending process – managing client documentation, sanctions and assisting the client till the entire lifecycle of loan disbursement.

“In the absence of any national-level mortgage distributor that has managed to scale up over the last decade, Square Capital has not only been able to generate massive digital leads but is also enabling fulfilment, either digitally or through its hybrid online to offline (O2O) approach.”, Tanuj added.

Eying the future growth of the company, Square Capital envisions becoming the largest online financial matchmaking platform in India and aiming for comprehensive ecosystem growth including customers, financial institutions & influencers. Square Capital technology team is currently working on an integrated tech platform that will take the entire end to end cycle of mortgage lending to an online platform – from customer query, product policy check, credit decision making, online applications, all integrated with bank’s backend system and right through disbursal of loans.

As India progresses towards a digitally enabled economy, a major part of lending and loan disbursal process will move online. The home loan mortgages business in India is ripe for disruption by a true end to end technology services marketplace like Square Capital that can handle the entire customer journey from search & discovery to fulfilment of loans.

About Square Capital

Square Capital is a marketplace lending platform that aggregates offers from financial institutions on a single platform and provides end to end fulfilment support in the lending process that includes assessing the credit worthiness/risk of clients, helping them choose the right product from the appropriate lending organization, managing their documentation, advising on professional issues pertaining to taxation & insurance and assisting the client till the entire lifecycle of loan disbursement.