Digital lending, built from zero

Business loans at Bizongo ran on email, calls and spreadsheets. Sales collected documents by hand, lenders reviewed them offline, and nobody could see where an application stalled.

I owned the move to a digital journey: application, documents, CRM, lender review and, later, the ONDC lender to borrower flow.

Between the February launch and 10 April, the web form drew 3,735 visits. Only 61 businesses reached the PAN step and 17 finished eligibility.

That told me the problem was not traffic. Asking for sensitive documents before showing eligibility, price or lender choice created a rational trust barrier.

I set up HubSpot end to end for lending, so every lead, deal and application event was recorded and attributed, and trained Sales on it.

When the self-serve journey stalled, I did not treat release as success. A retrospective showed customers had already sent documents, DSA-led deals needed help, and some leads should never have qualified.

So I rejected pushing harder on pure self-serve. The redesign started from a qualified deal, sent prefilled application links, allowed assisted and DSA-led completion, and kept company documents from being uploaded twice.

₹160 Cr sanctioned and about ₹3 Cr in revenue, with sanction time down from 90 to 20 days.

Document collection fell from about 15 days to 10. A low-code workflow I built generated about ₹20 L of lender invoices without routine Finance work.

The original journey assumed borrowers would serve themselves. The evidence said otherwise, and the product changed to match how loans were actually won.