How Propelld built a configurable loan engine for education financing

In India’s fast-evolving education lending market—where student borrowers rarely have income proof and repayment outcomes depend as much on institutions as individuals—fintech startup Propelld is betting on technology-led infrastructure to solve for pricing, risk and course completion, said Brijesh Samantaray, co-founder of the specialised education financing platform.

Founded in 2017, Bengaluru-based Propelld operates in a segment that sits awkwardly between consumer lending and institutional finance. “Education loans don’t behave like retail credit,” Samantaray said. “You are underwriting future outcomes, not present income. That changes how you think about risk, pricing and controls.”

To address this, Propelld has developed an in-house loan origination and servicing platform specifically tailored for education financing—an area where traditional income-led underwriting models and generic retail loan origination systems often fall short.

Rebuilding the loan lifecycle for education

At the core of Propelld’s operations is a proprietary technology stack that manages the entire loan lifecycle, from application intake and eligibility checks to credit assessment, institute approvals, disbursal and servicing. All of this is orchestrated through a configurable workflow engine.

Unlike hard-coded retail loan systems, Propelld’s workflows are structured as configurable execution trees. This allows the platform to create differentiated borrower journeys based on factors such as course type, institutional requirements and risk categories.

“In education financing, pricing and risk are heavily influenced by where a student studies and what they study,” Samantaray said. “You cannot push all borrowers through the same flow.”

This configurability, he added, allows the platform to scale across diverse education segments, including coaching, higher education and upskilling programmes, without forcing them into consumer credit paradigms.

Managing completion and misuse risk

One of the biggest risks in education lending is course non-completion, which often results in higher defaults and customer distress. Propelld addresses this by embedding institute confirmations directly into its disbursal workflows.

Funds are released only after formal enrolment approval from the institute, tightly aligning financing with the academic lifecycle. “That single control reduces misuse and dropout-related risk far more effectively than any post-facto collection strategy,” Samantaray said.

Automation across credit checks, document verification and operational validations has also helped reduce manual errors while improving turnaround times and pricing consistency. According to the company, integrating risk controls and institute workflows into a single system has been key to managing scale without compromising underwriting discipline.

Credit assessment without traditional income proof

Most student borrowers lack credit histories or income documentation, making conventional underwriting ineffective. Propelld follows a staged, rule-based credit assessment process rather than relying on single-point approvals.

The first layer involves automated eligibility checks using bureau data—primarily of co-applicants—along with predefined credit policies to issue soft approvals. Only after eligibility is established does the system trigger detailed documentation workflows.

Income, identity and relationship data are automatically extracted from verified documents such as Aadhaar and income tax returns and cross-verified against user declarations. “We separate the question of ‘can this applicant qualify’ from ‘should we disburse’,” Samantaray said.

This separation allows automation to handle repetitive checks, while exceptions are routed to human credit teams through defined workflows. “Explainability and control matter more than speed in this segment,” he added.

Underwriting the institute, not just the student

Propelld is also building an in-house underwriting framework to evaluate education providers on parameters such as placement outcomes, course maturity, historical performance and cohort-level trends.

Conceptually, the system is designed to function like a credit-rating lens for institutions, feeding structured risk inputs into lending workflows. “In education financing, long-term outcomes are often driven more by institutional quality than short-term financial indicators,” Samantaray said.

As the framework matures, institute scores are expected to inform credit policies, approval thresholds and risk differentiation across courses and campuses. The system is being built with governance in mind, allowing periodic validation, recalibration and human overrides to incorporate on-ground intelligence.

Alternative data and explainable decisioning

Beyond bureau scores, Propelld’s underwriting draws on multiple non-traditional data sources embedded within its platform. These include verified document-level information, institute data, course characteristics and historical portfolio performance.

The company is also building internal analytics to back-test credit policies against past cohorts. This allows it to simulate how different underwriting rules would have performed before implementing changes. Crucially, all decisions remain explainable. “Every outcome can be traced back to defined rules, extracted data points and workflow steps,” Samantaray said. “We are not chasing opaque models.”

Preventing stress before collections

While collections and repayments remain largely human-led, Propelld’s platform tracks granular operational and behavioural signals across onboarding and servicing. These signals help identify friction points—such as documentation delays or communication gaps—that often precede repayment stress.

“The goal is to fix problems upstream rather than react aggressively downstream,” Samantaray said. The roadmap includes using these insights for earlier, more targeted interventions while preserving a low-friction student experience.

A cautious approach to new-age courses

For emerging courses with limited outcome data, Propelld takes a conservative approach, prioritising institutions and programmes with observable performance signals such as placement history and course stability.

Newer courses are onboarded selectively, with tighter controls and greater human oversight until sufficient cohort-level data becomes available. “The technology allows us to be explicit about uncertainty rather than hiding it in assumptions,” Samantaray said.

What lies ahead?

In the near term, Propelld plans to complete automation across core credit and operations workflows, scale its institute underwriting framework and roll out configurable journeys for internal teams. The company is also exploring decision-support tools for students and parents, extending its role beyond financing into education guidance.

“The roadmap is about strengthening the foundations first,” Samantaray said. “Only then does technology meaningfully improve outcomes—for both students and lenders.”