Leegality, a document infrastructure platform, has introduced Local Language eSign Interfaces – to help scale up digitisation of paperwork processes, especially in the micro-lending and banking space.
Over the past few years, the adoption of digital execution of documents (electronic signatures, digital stamping and other digital document capabilities) has increased dramatically in the financial sector – especially among microfinance institutions.
However, widespread adoption at scale is hindered by a big accessibility gap between technology and the end customers of microfinance institutions and banks – especially in rural areas. Out of the 1.4 Billion population of India, only 15% or fewer Indians are comfortable and can understand documents in English. Local users gain confidence in navigating through documents without assistance when an English document is available to them in their local language. As per a study, 63% of local language users would prefer to read and access documents exclusively in their regional language.
Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) provide loans and other financial products to customers with limited or no access to financial services – generally microentrepreneurs and daily wage earners. The end consumer would have to forego her/his daily wages and invest time in obtaining this financial assistance. With Leegality, the end MFI consumer no longer has to spend half a day doing paperwork and can sign everything in minutes.
Shivam Singla – Founder of Leegality explained “Microfinance institutions and banks are embracing digitisation of paperwork in a big way. However, there is a gap between technology and the end customer that Microfinance Institutions and Banks serve – especially in rural areas – and this hinders digital adoption. With Local Language eSign, we hope to plug this gap – at least for digitisation of paperwork processes”
With Local Language eSign Interfaces, businesses using Leegality can offer digital document journeys to customers in a language of their choice – at the click of a button.
“An underrated factor in the relative success of ATM usage in India has been the default ability for the customer to change the language in which the entire ATM interface is delivered. With Local Languages, we hope to do the same with digital document execution and signing journeys.” said Singla.
Local Language eSign Interface is currently available in 9 Indian Languages – Hindi, Marathi, Odia, Gujarati, Malayalam, Bangla, Telegu, Tamil and Kannada – apart from English. This enables true financial inclusion by covering 85 to 90% of the population of India. Leegality has announced that support for more languages is on the way.
Leegality provides modern digital infrastructure that enables Indian businesses to build, test and deploy digital journeys for document execution, signing and stamping processes in a fast, compliant way. Today, Leegality is the digital document partner to over 1500 Indian businesses including group entities of banking conglomerates like HDFC, ICICI, IndusInd Bank among others.
Just as payments infrastructure has made collecting, making, settling and securing a payment so easy and smooth – Leegality’s document infrastructure makes all touchpoints in the paperwork journey as easy, fast and smooth. Completing your loan paperwork with a company that uses Leegality is as fast and easy as making a UPI payment on an app or in a kirana store.
In the past year, more than 10 leading Microfinance institutions across India have started using the platform to digitize paperwork for JLG lending processes to save costs, increase speed and enhance productivity.
Shivam further added “Leegality has been popular in the microfinance space due to the outsized returns MFIs are seeing from digitizing their document processes as well as the immense financial inclusion benefits for their end customer. We recently did a joint study with an MFI of AUM INR 2000+ Cr and they found that for every 1 rupee invested in Leegality, they received an equivalent return of 20 rupees in saved time, lower costs and enhanced productivity. Local Languages is the next logical step in enabling our MFI and Bank customers to scale up digital document processes in a wider, more accessible way.”
Beyond its business traction – Leegality is an extremely popular place to work – achieving an employee Net Promoter Score of 97 (in a survey conducted by Binny Bansal founded xto10x) – the highest in the Indian startup ecosystem.
Since 2020, the company has grown its quarterly revenue by over 13x and its employee strength by 7x, while also being cash flow positive.
With over 640M+ digitised signatures from all states across India, Leegality has reached 18M+ unique Indians. Not only has Leegality saved operating costs of over Rs. 1300+ crores, but it also has played a part in sustainability by saving more than 32000 trees by providing digitised paperwork solutions.
