SarvaGram: The New Playbook For Rural Credit

Episode Description

“The unit is not the individual, it is the household…”

While most lenders engage customers through apps and algorithms from a distance, Utpal Isser and Sameer Mishra built their entire model on an almost intimate understanding of rural households. They see the tractor parked outside. They notice the brother who works in a factory. They count the milch animals. They observe which family members contribute income and how it all flows together.

Every household interaction feeds into what they call an "MRI of the household." While the front-end is completely human, the back-end is 100% controlled by technology and processes they've meticulously built.

This is the story of how two banking veterans left the comfort of corporate leadership to build a differentiated rural lending platform. Utpal and Sameer started with a simple observation: while the financial sector was still designing products for poverty alleviation and agriculture, rural India had already moved on. The new rural middle class - 100 million households strong - was looking for something entirely different.

In this revealing conversation with Mridul Arora (Partner, Elevation Capital), Utpal and Sameer discuss their audacious vision of helping a million households move from one orbit of affluence to another and why any founder building for Bharat must "first go and live there”.

In this episode, you will gain insights on:

> Household as the unit, not the individual

> Why relationships drive collections

> The credit-productivity flywheel for rural prosperity

> Why culture can't be built from distance

…and more