Protium, an engineering-focused lender in India, says it has processed over 25 million transactions and disbursed more than Rs 5,300 crore in loans to date through its proprietary in-house platform, Turiya. Padmanabhan Balasubramanian, Partner at Protium, says the platform's exceptional capabilities in risk management and lending have solidified the company's position in the country's lending space.

Balasubramanian explained that the inspiration behind the creation of Turiya was to build a platform that could serve as a multi-product, omnichannel LOS (loan origination system) to enable Protium to be a full-stack lender to MSMEs and consumers.

"Turiya is a new software and analytics development paradigm, where the amount of coding can be anywhere between 0 and 100 percent depending on the use case. Lego is the closest we can compare our approach where a product manager can do the following: storytelling, build connectors, define a process and manage change without involvement from technology, analytics or the DevOps team," he said.

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When asked how Turiya ensures seamless onboarding of customers across multiple channels, Balasubramanian said that they focus on building highly efficient customer-centric journeys and risk parameters, and at the core of these customisations is minimising customer touchpoints, increasing efficiency in decision-making and providing multiple digital options to complete the process.

Regarding Turiya's risk assessment parameters, Balasubramanian explained that decisions are made via two broad approaches. "Algorithms implemented via a proprietary decision engine and automation, with human intervention at the appropriate steps of underwriting. In Turiya, a risk team member can configure policies at various steps of customer interaction and change them frequently as the market/segment evolves with full audit and change management capabilities build it," he explained.

Balasubramanian stated that Turiya's contribution to Protium's success has been significant, enabling the company to reach more customers and fuel its ambitions.

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"The core contribution lies in its ability to create efficient and agile engineering operations that can support multiple products, geographies, and channels. This versatility allows us to innovate and launch new products quickly and facilitate MSME lending through both secured and unsecured loans, platform lending and consumer lending with a short go-to-market time," he said.

Finally, Balasubramanian highlighted that Turiya helps build opportunities to provide access to financial services to customers who still are early in their digital adoption via their branch networks. He also mentioned that Turiya has faced technical challenges during development and implementation but has managed to overcome them by building a team of skilled engineers and focusing on creating an agile and efficient platform.

"Different products require different scales, a consumer durable business on festival days, vs mega sales on the online marketplace or quarter or month-end days for channel driven business. The team had to solve scaling via multiple accounts in a secure and cost-effective manner," he said.

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