Arohan Financial Services Limited | Annual Report 2021-22

Committee of the 39 Microfinance Institution lenders inAssam, workingwith the honourable Chief Minister and his dedicated team to make this a success. With the aim to get feedback from all stakeholders and make microfinance operations better, the Reserve Bank of India released a Consultative Document on regulation of Microfinance in June 2021. Following this, the central bank announced the new MFI Regulations in March 2022, heralding a paradigm shift in the norms, especially for NBFC-MFIs like us. In my opinion, this is the dawn of MFI Version 3.0, starting April 2022. Widely seen as the Reserve Bank of India’s move to support the Government of India’s (GoI) focus on Financial Inclusion, the new regulation lays out a level- playing field on credit guidelines, as well as on pricing for risk and costs across entities. Industry observers and practitioners see this as a hugely positive move that will go a long way in the sector trebling from the current INR 2,50,000 Cr portfolio outstanding across 60 million end clients over the next 3 to 5 years with the support of the credit bureaus, Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity, IT- enablement, and the leading efforts of lenders and investors. Although, Arohan took a conservative approach to business last year with a focus on collections, we ensured that our regular borrowers were provided with the credit they needed and deserved. We continued with our focus on adding to the management bench strength and successfully onboarded a new Chief Business Officer to steer our organization towards the next phase of growth. Our field teams deserve recognition for handling the difficult external conditions of the pandemic, cyclones, elections, local restrictions and lockdowns amongst others, in which they had to meet customers and manage customer relationships. Our unique 3 pillar quality approach with Branch Operations & Quality, Internal Audit andRiskManagement basedon the foundation of a strong Credit Underwriting vertical, have kept us in good stead as we navigated through the pandemic, while preparing for normalcy. With new initiatives and fine-tuned processes, our quality functions will always be the steel frame when we scale up and grow. Our five-year Vision plan of 20 by 2025 will need an additional year to make up for lost time during the pandemic. We feel proud that Arohan is the first FinTech MFI in India with the implementation of a full IT road map – paperless origination, a first- in-the-sector credit scoring model under beta testing, the Core Banking System on which we onboard loans, our comprehensive MeraArohan app for the field staff, the Sanjaya field tracking portal, the ApnaBazaar Cross Sell app and the newly launched ApnaArohan app for the customers – from where one can review her loan account, raise a service request and also make a cashless payments through the inbuilt gateway. The final icing on the cake has been Arohan becoming one 15 Annual Report | 2021-2022 Managing Director’s Address