The Reserve Bank of India Innovation Hub (RBIH) has onboarded digital lender Vivifi Finance to run a pilot project to offer unsecured loans to gig workers, two people with the knowledge said.
The pilot that was launched a fortnight ago is aimed at creating a digital platform that offers loans to drivers of cab-hailing apps like Ola and Uber drivers, food delivery drivers employed with Swiggy and Zomato, and other temporary jobs.
“The RBI innovation hub is running a pilot with Vivifi Finance and three other gig platforms, where alternate data is being used to underwrite these gig workers,” said a source aware of the matter. “The idea is to bring them into formal banking channels and offer them credit based on that data.”
The RBI and Vivifi India Finance did not respond to ET’s queries until Sunday press time.
The pilot is currently in the early stages.
“The pilot has been launched quite recently and the stakeholders involved are using data available with banks and credit bureaus plus alternate data which is both economic and behavioural that is being obtained through gig platforms,” said another official. “Once the pilot is successful, the next plan is to link it with the Unified Lending Interface (ULI) platform.”
More than 600,000 loans amounting to ₹27,000 crore have been disbursed using the ULI platform in the pilot project.
The RBIH had earlier launched a Public Tech Platform for Frictionless Credit, which was used to build an end-to-end digital solution to offer agriculture loans. This platform was renamed Unified Lending Interface which commenced in a pilot phase on August 17, 2023.
According to data from RBI, as of December 6, 2024, over 6 lakh loans amounting to ₹27,000 crore have been disbursed using application programming interfaces from the platform. A substantial number of micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) loans worth ₹14,500 crore to 160,000 beneficiaries have been disbursed.
The ULI is a digital public infrastructure in the lending space, which aims to unlock critical financial, non-financial and alternate data for lenders to enable informed credit decisions. So far, 36 lenders, including various banks and NBCs have been onboarded. These lenders are using more than 50 data services including, authentication and verification services, land records data from six states, satellite service, property search, dairy insights and document verification, to gain customer information.
