What is Faircent? Faircent Review, Features

Founded in July 2014, Faircent is a P2P platform headquartered in Gurgaon, India. The platform is an intermediary institution that mainly serves independent investors with risk identification capabilities, and connects borrowers and lenders for unified loan transactions.

About Faircent

Fairaseets Technologies is the parent company of Faircent and is responsible for operating the Faircent.com portal (a virtual P2P lending platform) and mobile application. As a centralized platform, the company brings individual borrowers and lenders together for unified loan transactions without the intervention of traditional financial institutions such as banks and non-banking financial companies.

Platform role

The role of the Faircent platform is to assess whether the borrower is suitable for borrowing on the P2P platform:

1. Actually verify the borrower’s work and residential address.

2. Verify proof of income, repayment ability, past performance, stability and willingness to repay.

3. Faircent evaluates each borrower and establishes 120 criteria through 400 data dimensions, including financial situation, professional, social and educational background, loan record, etc., and only selects borrowers who best meet the loan conditions. All information about each borrower is shared on the loan page so that lenders can make decisions.

Collection process

If a default occurs, the collection process is as follows:

1. The office collection team communicates with defaulting borrowers and uses telephone and text message collection methods.

2. Let legal collection agencies follow up.

3. Lawyer’s letter is sent.

4. Debt collection shall be carried out by legal collection agencies.

Lenders can view all processes after logging into their accounts. Faircent only provides automatic collection services for unrated borrowers. Defaulting customers will be blacklisted, and the costs of sending lawyers' letters and collecting debts from intermediary companies will be borne by the lenders themselves.

Transaction Process

To ensure that every fund transfer transaction on the platform is safe and fast, Faircent has opened a lender escrow account under the custody of IDBI Bank. Lenders will get a virtual account number under the escrow account with an IFSC code. They transfer the amount they want to invest through Faircent to this virtual account. Once their loan transaction with the borrower is completed, Faircent will transfer the money in the escrow account directly to the borrower's bank account.

The salient features of this managed account are:

1. Faircent has no right to interfere or choose to withdraw from this account.

2. The lender provides instructions to ITSL (IDBI Custody Services Ltd.) and these instructions are forwarded to ICICI for execution.

3. Faircent cannot perform any transaction operations and can only view the status completed through this account.

4. The trustee shall audit the operations of the account regularly.

5. The lender can withdraw money from the escrow account at any time by writing a letter, and it will generally be transferred to his bank account within 24 banking hours.

Platform Features

1. The platform is positioned as an information intermediary. The platform needs to review the qualifications of the lender and the information provided, and assess the risk level of the borrower, but it is not responsible for the borrower's default. The lender bears the risk himself.

2. Platform pricing is determined by bidding, and the system performs matching. The platform also has an automatic investment function.

3. Faircent has a cooperative fund custodian institution, and the fund transfer between the two parties is realized through the custodian bank. The platform has no right to touch the funds.

4. In order to protect the interests of lenders, the platform has corresponding thresholds for lenders and requires lenders to diversify their investments.

5. The platform’s profit model is to charge fees from both borrowers and lenders.

Financing

-In January 2015, it received US$4 million in angel round financing.

-In June 2015, it received US$250,000 in seed round financing.

-In August 2016, it received a US$1.5 million Series B funding led by Brand Capital.

-In December 2016, it received strategic funding from Microsoft Accelerator Bangalore, with an undisclosed amount.

-In December 2017, Faircent completed a B+ round of financing of Rs 250 million, led by Incofin Investment Management, with participation from JM Financial, 3one4 Capital, M&S Partners Pte Ltd and Aarin Capital, which had previously invested in the company, as well as new investors MUTHOOTFINCORP EIP Das Capital and Starharbor AsiaPte Ltd.