Inspiration
In India, there has been a huge revolution in fintech ever since UPI (Unified Payments Interface) was launched in 2016, which helped cashless transactions reach the common man. In light of these advancements, our team decided to create our own loan agent platform called Aarthik Setu (Economic Bridge), which aims to provide short- to medium-tenor loans.
What it does
Since UPI, there have been many more additions to the India Stack family—one of them is OCEN, the latest addition. OCEN (Open Credit Enablement Network) is a defined set of APIs that all members on the network follow. This allows seamless integration whenever we want to onboard any lender, bank, or investor onto our platform. Aarthik Setu is currently a web-only platform.
How we built it
Our team consists of students from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras—the same college as Aravind Srinivas, co-founder of Perplexity. We began our research by analyzing the questions asked by lenders to potential borrowers and discussed the order and priority of asking those same questions in a non-personal setting.
We ultimately settled on the Flutter framework so we could deploy our solution across multiple platforms like Android, iOS, and web. Currently, we are focused on the web version and have made significant progress since its inception.
Challenges we ran into
One of the biggest challenges we faced was the nature of the questionnaire we had to create, depending on the type of loan the borrower was interested in. For every category of loan we decided to add—personal loans, business loans, home loans, etc.—we had to design a unique set of forms with their own specific questions.
There was no single repository where we could find these questions, so we had to invest countless hours browsing the internet and analyzing competitors to determine the best format for our loan forms on the platform.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have made significant progress in integrating AI into Aarthik Setu. One of our newest features is a RAG-based government scheme finder for MSMEs that takes your use case and recommends the most suitable government schemes.
Another feature is our general-purpose chatbot, which assists users who want to learn more about the platform or are simply confused about what kind of loan to apply for.
What we learned
Throughout the development process, our team developed a knack for deep research—going beyond just simple web searches (we're talking about a time before the Deep Research feature 😄). We learned how to collate and synthesize information to build something genuinely useful.
On the software side, we were already confident in our skills, and this project only strengthened them further.
What's next for Aarthik Setu
We plan to code the mobile version of our platform, considering the widespread use of handheld devices, especially since internet access has become extremely affordable in India (the cheapest in the world). We already have the designs ready.
Another major feature in the pipeline is creating a credit score index within our platform, which will heavily leverage AI.
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