Fixing India’s debt collection industry

In 2019, Ananth Shroff was travelling abroad when he missed a credit card payment. Unable to reach him on his usual number, the bank contacted his family and threatened legal action. The experience cost the bank a customer and planted the seed for DPDzero.

Founded by Shroff and Ranjith BR, the startup provides an AI-powered debt collection platform for banks, fintechs, and NBFCs in India. It helps lenders recover overdue payments through automated reminders, tailored payment plans, and borrower behaviour analysis.

Money talks:

• DPDzero offers three products. Pre-delinquency management ensures borrowers pay on time. Flow management handles borrowers who’ve missed payments but whose loans haven’t been classified as NPAs. Recovery manages loans that have already been written off, where lenders have provisioned these losses to the RBI.
• Currently, 15% of collections are handled entirely by AI, while 85% involve human agents. The system operates in Hindi and Tamil, as the startup develops others.
• The startup says its current run rate is nearly Rs 140 crore in monthly collections, handled through 650 agents who make around 140,000 calls every day. It tracks zero escalations as a key metric alongside collection rates and costs.