The business-to-customer (B2C) version of ULI will take the form of a sovereign application, initially focused on priority credit flows such as small-ticket digital Kisan Credit and agricultural loans. ULI pilots are also underway for other lending categories across segments such as gold, dairy, housing, and personal and vehicle loans.
“The ultimate idea has always been that ULI should have a B2C app with multiple lenders. The vision is to provide borrowers and lenders a single platform and not compete with any aggregators,” a person with the knowledge of the matter said.
ULI is a universal API (application programming interface) gateway that enables end-to-end loan journeys acting as a common infrastructure between data-service providers and regulated entities such as lenders.
The development of the application is still in its early days but is expected to improve loan journeys from identity verification to credit disbursement.
Queries sent to RBIH on the matter did not elicit a response till press time.
“ULI will look at Kisan Credit and agricultural loans to start with and the intention is to farm them out through multiple banks. Every individual should get multiple offers from lenders and a borrower should be able to choose the best offer,” a second person said.
The executive added that regulated entities required integration with the core ULI infrastructure and that each lender would have to adhere to its credit policies before extending a loan.
“Work is still in its initial development cycle and there’s more to be done,” the person said.
The borrower-facing B2C layer of ULI mirrors a familiar template in India’s digital public infrastructure, where core rails are paired with a regulator-backed front end — much as the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) now supplements the real-time payments system Unified Payments Interface (UPI) with its own app, BHIM.
ULI has more than 89 lenders along with over 53 data-service providers offering 141 categories of data, Business Standard reported earlier.
It addresses key friction points in lending, including multiple API integrations, the inability of lenders to use alternative data sets, and the complexity of collaboration with data-service providers.
As a singular rail for credit infrastructure, ULI is thus responsible for taking on board multiple types of data sets that a lender might require to process a loan application.
Some examples of data types on ULI include data on land ownership from state departments, credit scores from credit bureaus, income verification from account aggregators, and dairy insights.
The RBIH undertakes the process of collaborating and maintaining these integrations with various data-service providers allowing lenders to use such APIs with ease.
As a result of standardised API access and real-time data availability of data service providers, lenders may see lending costs cut by around 60 per cent.
