Branch’s Journey to a High Success Rate with Multi-Bank Support through Cashfree Payments

About Branch Personal Loan App

Branch is a lending platform that helps individuals borrow, save, and improve their financial health. With over 1 Cr+ Downloads on the Google play store, Branch promises its users access to up to ₹ 50,000 as a loan using the mobile phone app, anytime and anywhere.

Feature in focus:

Connected Payouts API

Challenge

Recent RBI lending guidelines regulating money flow between lending platforms and borrowers

In 2022, to regulate lending activities and safeguard borrower interests in the country, the RBI introduced new digital lending guidelines. These guidelines aimed to govern the flow of funds between Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) and borrowers. NBFCs were granted a deadline until November 30, 2022, to establish appropriate systems and processes in compliance with these guidelines.

One of the essential requirements for Branch was to be able to switch between multiple banking options seamlessly, for backup in case of failure, and to allow for growth.

Solution

Branch, in its pursuit of automating the loan payout process to its borrowers while staying compliant with the lending guidelines linked its current bank account with Cashfree using Connected Payouts API. Cashfree Payments team assisted Branch in establishing this connection, allowing Branch to go live with the Connected Payouts API ahead of the November 30, 2022 deadline.

By leveraging the API, Branch streamlined the entire loan disbursement flow, enabling quicker loan processing and more efficient loan payout management. Whenever a borrower submits a loan request, Branch swiftly processes the request and disburses the loan from its linked its current bank account using Cashfree Payouts APIs. Cashfree Payments guarantees timely money receipt for borrowers while ensuring the safety and security of their account details.

The Results

High success rate with multi-bank support: One of the critical areas where Cashfree Payments has added significant value for Branch is providing the latter with single integration across multiple banks, allowing them to switch between multiple banks, during events of downtime easily and thus helping them maintain an industry’s best success rate.  and reduce redundancy. This made their operations more efficient and helped the organisation to avoid costly downtime.

Near 100% reconciliation in 5 minutes: One of the critical areas where Cashfree Payouts added significant value for Branch is reconciliation. Cashfree helped Branch automate the process of reconciliation: managing transfers, tracking failures, and handling reversals across various transfer methods, destination banks, and reporting formats in real-time.

Why Connected Payouts?

Connected Payouts is an API-based solution by Cashfree Payments that lets businesses send money to their beneficiaries by linking their existing corporate bank account with Cashfree Payouts account and sending money instantly 24x7x365 even on bank holidays.  Businesses can also use Connected Payouts APIs for use cases like refund management, loan disbursals, salary payouts etc. Cashfree Payments has built direct integration with multiple banks for its connected payout rails including ICICI Bank, IndusInd Bank, Axis Bank, Yes Bank, and Kotak Bank among other banks.

Are you an existing ICICI Bank corporate account holder?

Link your ICICI business account with Cashfree Payments Connected Payouts APIs and upgrade your business payouts. Here’s why!

• Do instant & automated payouts without any cooling period for beneficiary addition from the linked ICICI bank account(s)
• Do payouts not only to bank accounts but also to UPI handles, cards and wallets like AmazonPay
• Say goodbye to manually adding funds to your Cashfree Payouts wallet
• Avoid payment failures by setting a low balance alert & get notified

Follow the steps to link your Business ICICI bank account and use Cashfree Connected Payouts APIs https://docs.cashfree.com/docs/add-bank-account-as-fund-source