A fast-growing NBFC improved its Onboarding by 23% by employing a Document Translation Engine
About the customer
Our customer is one of the leading non-deposit-taking Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC) in India, part of an esteemed Group. It focuses on digital lending and aims to democratize access to credit through technology and strategic partnerships.
Challenge
Every single loan application had agreements, KYC documents, and notices. Multiply that by tens of thousands every month, and you get the scale. And here's the catch, most of their customers weren't comfortable with just English. They wanted Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, or whatever language they spoke at home.
We saw three big blockers right away:
- Regulatory headaches. RBI rules required that customer-facing documents be available in the customer's language. Doing that manually was slow and risky.
- Turnaround delays. Some loan files were sitting for 2–3 days just for translation. In lending, that's a deal-breaker.
- Borrower trust. Many Tier-2 and Tier-3 borrowers hesitated to sign because they couldn't fully understand the paperwork. That's money left on the table.
Solution
We didn't just drop in a tool. We spent a few weeks mapping their actual document flow, including who touched what, where delays occurred, and what required compliance approval. Then we slotted Devnagri's document translation system right in the middle of that flow.
- API plug-in. Agreements and notices flowed through our machine translation API automatically. No emailing back and forth.
- Human checks where it mattered. Compliance documents and contracts went through our linguists. We didn't risk automation there.
- Finance glossary. We created a fixed list for terms like moratorium period or EMI default clause, so translations stayed consistent across states.
- Security. End-to-end encryption and audit logs, because no NBFC wants data leaks in their loan files.
Key Features
- Automated translation inside their document management system
- 12+ Indian languages covered (Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu…)
- Real-time processing + manual override for sensitive files
- Complete audit trail for regulators
- Ability to handle 50k+ pages every month without queues
Impact
The shift was immediate.
- Loan paperwork that used to take ~72 hours to clear was moving in less than 24.
- Audit issues around "language mismatch" dropped to zero.
- Onboarding completion in smaller towns improved by about 23%. More people signed because they understood what they were signing.
- Costs went down ~40% compared to their earlier vendor setup.
- In year one, the system handled over 600,000 pages without breakdowns.
If documents don't speak the borrower's language, growth slows. This NBFC achieved rapid growth without compromising accuracy by automating the heavy lifting and ensuring people were kept informed for compliance purposes.
