Quiklo extends digital lending services with education loans launch

BENGALURU: Quiklo, a startup founded by IIT-ians Mrigank Shekhar, Kush Srivastava and Rahul Saxena in 2015 with consumer durables finance targeted towards the student community, has today announced its foray into education finance.

Backed by Accel Partners and Traxcn Labs, Quiklo will use its unique risk assessment engine to offer education and test prep loans to students who are not eligible for direct loans from banks.

Quiklo follows a simple and easy-to-understand process that involves their credit check procedures and get instant approvals on the case from the banks that will sanction the loan. Initially, the education loan will be restricted to yearly fees, payable during the year, which gets repeated for each subsequent semester of education.

Co-founder of Quiklo, Mrigank Shekhar said, "The education loan sector has a very low penetration in the country with only 5% getting loans for education and about 10% getting personal loan for education fees. While the selection criteria for banks are already strict, they give loans for a fixed set of Top 100 colleges, beyond which the coverage is very minimal. Quiklo, through our education finance platform, aims to empower those who have been declined loans in the past."

The undergraduate and postgraduate tuition and hostel fees and test prep together is a $50 billion  market, and loans for these offerings is a $10 billion market opportunity. Startups like Quiklo aim to achieve a share of this market through their digital lending platform.

Prayank Swaroop, the Principal of Accel Partners added, "We really liked the Quiklo team and decided to incubate them in our office. Education is an exciting space to be in. The founders spent a number of months on ideation, market research and product design - our investing team members supported them through this process. And we have been part of the Quiklo journey since inception. The team has done an exceptional job of execution and proving the vision they set out to achieve."

The loan requests that are received by Quiklo currently amount to Rs 5 crore a month. Quiklo's success story lies in its indigenous credit assessment engine, which looks at several data points before it disburses out a loan. Over the past year, the startup has even kept their non-performing assets as low as 1.5 percent of total disbursements.