ICICI Bank Becomes First in India to Use Satellite Data To Assess Farmer Loans

ICICI Bank has announced that it will make use of satellite data, in combination with technologies from agri-tech and fin-tech firms, to offer advanced, remote credit assessment for extending loans to farmers. The technology will involve using advanced satellite imagery to assess farm lands in parameters such as land quality, location, irrigation and year-round crop patterns. This data set will be combined with demographic data as well as financial spending patterns from fin-tech companies, in a bid to increase maximum credit allocation for farmers with existing credit history, as well as introduce farmers new to the credit system with faster assessment and lesser hassle. All of this, ICICI Bank claims, will help them reduce the time taken for processing farmer loans down from 15 days to a “few” days.

Among the type of data that will be collected by ICICI Bank to extend loans to farmers include data and patterns of rainfall and average temperature at a particular location, soil moisture data assessed through satellite imagery and smart analytics driven by agri-tech firms, availability of surface level water for easy irrigation, extensive crop trends for a particular farmer’s farm lands including types of crops grown, duration between sowing and harvesting, as well as average quality and health of crop yields. Additional data that will be collected by ICICI Bank also include size and location of farm lands, and their proximity to warehouses and marketplaces for the farmers to sell their produce.