Profile: Deepak Kumar, Lytyfy – Winner, India

What is your off-grid energy business? Can you give a brief overview? How long have you been working on this business?

Lytyfy is a clean energy financing company which helps low and middle income customers to buy good quality solar products and service with flexible financing options. We are trying to increase the adoption of clean energy technologies and make it preferred choice compared to energy supplied by the conventional grid.

We assess customers repayment capability based on our indicators based on which we package the product with financing options at the point of sale. We have been working Lytyfy for past two years.

What inspired you to start working in off-grid energy?  Are there any key people who inspired you to work in this area?

Me and my cofounder while working with a Government project got to interact with BoP communities which weren’t covered by formal financial institutions. Working closely with them we realised that they usually possess high level of aspirations and most of the families even though low income were ready to pay the premium for essential services/products like energy, children education and business loans. This segment in general is not considered credit worthy by formal financial institutions because of their traditional credit assessment methods. We started working on this problem and tried to  leverage technology to design risk profiles by including non-traditional and non-financial data to enable effective credit scoring and repayment capability for them. The idea eventually lead to creation of Lytyfy. The impact we have in the economic and social development of our customers is what keeps us going and the size and extent of this problem provides us urgency as well as motivation to solve this in our lifetime.

If you could share some wisdom with yourself 3 years ago, what would it be?

Passion is important to start something but what is more important is to have patience and ability to sustain that passion.  Being an entrepreneur means to have long term view of things and  it would always help to break away from the routine to reenergize and refocus.

Where do you hope to be 3 years from now?

 

Our target is to impact one million lives by 2020.

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