In a special feature interview for FinTech Egypt, the modern analytics & technology services company Quantafic Business Solutions LLP shares some insight on the company’s challenges, products and future plans. The India-based data experts won the CIB FinTech Galaxy Innovation Challenge at Seamless North Africa 2019 conference back in June, marking a new chapter in its journey to stardom.

FinTech Egypt (FE): What was the most difficult challenge faced by Quantafic since its inception in 2014?

Quantafic (Q): There have been many challenges and it has become part and parcel of daily life now. If I must mention a specific challenge, then I will select the one we faced while making our Rule Engine live with one of the NBFCs. The challenge was to handle more than 30,000 applications in a day. We deployed our solution and the customer performed UAT and it was approved. It was the 25th of May and on the 1st of June, the solution had to go live. On the afternoon of the 25th, we encountered an issue while conduct a performance test. We were confident that we would be able to resolve this issue and our application had the capability of handling more than 50,000 applications per day. Somehow, the application was locking and we were not able to complete the performance testing. Everyone was tense. My colleague who leads technology parked himself at the customer’s premises and we assured them that we will not leave until we solve the task at hand. We were working hard, and we were on the 28th and still the issue was not resolved. While we were confident, tensions were increasing as we were working against time. If we didn’t go live by June 1st, then it would have been a big issue as stakes were very high. While my colleague, Sunil, was concentrating on resolving the technical issue, myself and another colleague were working on other options if unfortunately we are not able to make it. We worked day & night and finally on the morning of the 30th, we resolved the issue and performance testing was highly successful. The customer was very impressed by the test results as we processed a far greater number of applications than they expected. The application was live on June 1st and everyone was delighted. Those 5 days were highly tense for us, and we barely managed to sleep for 5 days. An excellent effort by our technology team led by Sunil!

FE: Which of your business solutions do you consider to be your flagship product and why?

Q: Quantafic Digital Lending powered by Machine learning is the flagship product for Quantafic. Digital lending allows our customer to process loan applications through mobile as well as a web application. This provides ease to the sales team as they can close the loan deal by sitting across the table from the customer. The machine learning algorithm allows the user to capture images of customer documents, and the application extracts the details from images and auto-populates the fields. This feature enables quick data entry. The Risk Evaluator module of the digital lending application derives the risk category of customers and loan pricing can be derived as per risk categorization. The solution connects to multiple databases and credit bureaus to validate the details provided by the customer. Rule engine, which is the heart of the solution, allows to configure multiple credit policies, and every loan application is evaluated against each of these credit policies. Our digital lending application is highly scalable and can sanction customer loans within a few minutes.

FE: What do you expect from financial institutions to deploy your solution more effectively?

Q: We generally ask financial institutions to provide their business requirements in detail so that we can address all the expected scenarios. We generally provide hardware details at the beginning and expect those to be ready when we start deployment. Depending on customer requirements, we also need historical data to build analytical algorithms for risk evaluation and image processing.

FE: After winning the CIB FinTech Galaxy Innovation Challenge at Seamless 2019, what are your future plans for Quantafic? Do you intend to expand your solution outside Egypt?

Q: We are very happy and excited with the CIB FinTech win. CIB being the largest private sector bank in Egypt, we expect lot of market-leading solutions to be launched by CIB and with our technology & analytics skills, we hope to be able to contribute to the CIB’s growth. We are looking to Africa as a growth region for our products and analytics offerings. We are already talking to a few customers in the West Africa region for our machine learning algorithm and mobile applications. We are quite hopeful that Africa as a continent will have large opportunities and we will be able to grab the pie from it.

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  Quantafic, CIB, Commercial International Bank, FinTech Galaxy Innovation Challenge, Seamless NA, Seamless 2019, India, Africa, Interview, digital lending