Making it Big in a Small & Medium World

335. That is the number of days we needed to recover US$50,000 from an exporter of leather jackets. It was our first transaction with him and unfortunately for him and us, there were disputes around the quality of the jackets.

For a big bank, the exporter would have been a faceless entity. He would have been dragged through the legal system and forced to pay up or lose his company.

But Drip Capital’s philosophy of working with clients to solve problems, and its unique understanding of the constraints that small and medium exporters face, allowed us to engage in a constructive dialog with the buyer and the client for almost a year. The reward of keeping the faith was a successful recovery of the principal along with the interest — and a loyal customer.

There are many such instances that demonstrate the flexibility that we derive from our unique data and tech-driven approach to Client Selection and Risk Underwriting at Drip Capital.

The risk function at Drip is sometimes a legal David, taking on the big bank Goliaths as it challenges the status quo. At other times I find my team morphing into traders trying to find buyers for something as exotic as boneless buffalo meat, in markets we scarcely knew even existed.

The risk team is a mix of people from diverse backgrounds. We have people from banking, financial institutions, insurance, manufacturing and even two-wheeler sales backgrounds, who are all individually and together contributing to protecting the capital and promoting growth within Drip. We have a techie amongst us to whom we made no sense at the beginning and who made no sense to us. But today he understands us perfectly while we pretend to know how he does what he does.

Working with a diverse team is enriching and empowering. Everyone has a right to voice their opinions, and each of us benefits from this. We debate all options intensely and then execute the agreed decisions clinically. We are the last checkpoint before the buck flies out and hence, there is very little room for errors — we are always vigilant. We scan financials for inconsistencies and our hawk eyes have caught documentary fraud too. We would love our days to be uneventful, but sometimes they do happen to be exciting.

I have worked in many great organizations, big and small, but working at Drip is especially fulfilling as you can see the immediate impact of your decisions — on the team, the organization, and the clients.

Corporate ambitions and social good are seemingly opposite concepts. But at Drip we have discovered that finding solutions to the problems that small and medium exporters face can be both enriching and fulfilling, together.