New interview with Akshay Mehra, CEO of Crowd Genie
Crowd Genie is a peer-to-peer lending platform based in Singapore.
It connects small to medium businesses seeking loans with capital via a blockchain-based cryptocurrency system. Lenders obtain better rates than they would at a bank and borrowers receive better terms. Borrowers who otherwise might not get access to such loans, now have a place to turn. The company was granted regulatory approval in March 2017 by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. That said, Singapore is just their launch country. The team has their eye set on pan-Asian expansion.
How it works is simple; a borrower will be matched with lenders. Lenders can expect to make at least 14% return with all funds held in escrow. This peer to peer lending activities will be tokenized using smart contracts to enable lending without borders more efficient, cheaper and safer. Ultimately, the team has a vision to build an Asset Trading Exchange on Blockchain that will democratize trading and allow investment in infrastructure, stocks, cryptocurrency, and bonds across Asia, which would be prohibitively expensive, and potentially unfeasible due to issues of transparency and trust without Blockchain.
We recently sat down with Akshay Mehra, the CEO of Crowd Genie to have a chat with him about the project as well as finding out his thoughts and insights.
Hi, Akshay. Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us more about yourself and Crowd Genie?Hi Daniel, thanks for your invitation. Before founding Crowd Genie, I was the board advisor at Anchanto e-commerce, and previously the brand management head at P&G and Principal Consultant at Innosight. The reason why I created Crowd Genie is simple. I want to make borrowing faster, cheaper, and simpler compared to traditional financing methods. Crowdfunding is popular in the West, but the idea is relatively new in Singapore and other Asia countries. Observing how lenders getting low returns from the banks because of the overhead costs and how established SMEs unable to receive full funding desired and become under-banked, I would like to match this two parties together to solve the problem and that’s what Crowd Genie has been doing.
Why did you decide to use blockchain in building Crowd Genie?Although our existing P2P digital loan business is incredibly innovative in the Singapore financial sector, it would have been impossible to scale to enable lending without borders and offer Asia-wide asset trading before blockchain technology was introduced.
Make borrowing faster, cheaper, and simpler compared to traditional financing methods
To build and scale an asset exchange with pre-blockchain technologies would be prohibitively expensive, and potentially unfeasible due to issues of transparency and trust.
Was that your plan from the start or did you start the service and realize that this technology was the only way of scaling, particularly internationally?
Yes, my initial plan was to transform Crowd Genie into a regional lending platform where lenders from one country can lend to borrowers from another, not restricted by geography limitation. The introduction of Blockchain technology has made our vision more cost feasible and practical now
Source:
https://www.chipin.com/crowd-genie-ceo-akshay-mehra-interview/................
Thank you Akshay for the informative interview. Hope you guys enjoyed it.
Best regards,
Brian Li, Community Manager
