reFinery

reFinery is a solution for banking/non-banking customers to submit financial requirements for their project/business and get fund from all the registered banks/credit unions through community funding.

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Inspiration

Our inspiration was a UK program called Dragon's Den as well as a recent study on inclusive banking in US and emerging markets. The report mentioned that in advanced economies there are still nearly 10% of population out of formal banking as well as in emerging markets such as India, Africa etc. its nearly 50%. We have also tried to utilize the latest improvements in technology enabled lending.

What it does

reFinery is a platform through which we have tried to fix a problem in lending where the financial institution (bank) always own the risk of amount lent. Instead of banks lending the consumers, we are facilitating the bank members to fund the loan requestor directly by owning up some part of the risk which gives them increased return of investment. reFinery platform also remove the requirement of pledging existing assets of the business or assets of the owners for the security of a loan and instead consider the infrastructure procured for the startup/project itself as security for the loan. Thus, we are enabling the start-up or business to get the fund without the anxiety about their existing assets being pledged and utilize their skills/experience to make the project/business a success. reFinery platform provides the facility to a loan requestor to submit all the documents related to the startup or project and their experience in the field etc. along with financial projection such as break even period etc. to get the approval from the bank for the project. Once approved, the members of the bank can choose from the approved list of projects for funding. One or more members can fund a single project. Once the required amount is confirmed the platform will communicate with Core Banking solutions via Fusion Fabric to generate the loan accounts and investment accounts on behalf of the funding member and loan requestor. The workflow for the loan and investment accounts will be maintained via the existing core banking solutions. Infrastructure acquired with these types of loans will be pledged as security for the loan, which eases the fund requestor's mind and allow them to focus on the new business rather than worrying about debt. For inclusive banking the non-banking customers can also raise the project request and the the platform will use psychometric analysis (for Alternate Credit Scoring) to find the credit worthiness. For banking customers system will use traditional credit ranking from credit bureaus. The system will also rank the project based on the experience of the loan requestor in the business, existing volume of business etc. for calculation of credit worthiness.

How we built it

We have used Flutter to design the front end of the tool which connects with WebAPI in C# and SQL Server hosted on Azure Server. Flutter work on both mobile and browser seamlessly. reFinery then consume FFDC WebAPI to connect to core banking end-points hosted too on Azure. FFDC APIs will connect to core banking solution Phoenix or UltraData.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was to identify the business feasibility of this idea and we have found there is no similar product currently available in US market. We have also came to know that there is a tax benefit in funding start ups which will be an advantage for this product.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy that we have been able to design a new platform for investment opportunities for those who are interested in startups or projects outside of the normal banking products or share market. We are also able to provide an investment opportunity for banking customers which gives them a higher rate of returns, if they are ready to own some risk in start-up investment. We were also able to study a new development tool called Flutter and also got an opportunity to work in APIs between Flutter UI and Data Server. We have also worked in FFDC Core APIs for core banking processing.

What we learned

We have been able to analyze the existing products in the market which addresses the risk in funding for startups and has come up with this solution. Dragon's Den program has been a guideline on how a project need to be presented for funding requests. We have also learned about some challenges in the existing lending products. It has been a great experience on the new technology called Flutter and the FFDC APIs which is used to connect both Ultradata and Phoenix core banking platforms.

What's next for reFinery

We have done a sample PoC but this can be developed into a full platform or solution to cater banks or credit unions of any size and the FFDC APIs can be used to connect to any core, Phoenix or UltraData, to manage the loan and investment accounts.

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