How to check the eligibility of a personal loan online?

With smartphones costs going down and internet penetration increasing in India, the ease with which you can check your personal loan eligibility through online has come as a boon to the busy yuppie.

Gone are the days when you called up a personal loan agent who showed up after few days, collected documents, filled your forms and got your signatures on them. Then probably he called you again to say that additional documents were required and took a few days to collect them.
  

Even then, the bank would take a few days more to conduct verification and let you know if your personal loan was approved.

Finally, when the loan was processed after verification, may be that lucrative offer on a luxury flat or cheap vacation to Europe was already gone. 
 

The purpose of getting a personal loan is served when it is processed fast, with minimum documentation and disbursed within a shorter time frame. This is where online eligibility checks and processing are becoming more effective.

Another important component of determining eligibility is your Credit Information Bureau of India Limited (CIBIL) score. Your eligibility for a loan depends on your credit history—which is nothing but a summary of your current and past borrowings. Your credit information score is a three-digit number ranging from 300 to 900. This lets the lenders know your past behavior in paying off loans. The CIBIL website allows you to check your credit information score online by paying a fee and answering a few authentication questions. If successful, you get your score report by email in minutes.

A customer looking for personal loans online can access the banks and financial institutions directly or go via several third-party aggregator sites which provide easy comparison and application process to connect you with various lenders. The advantage of these third-party aggregator sites is that they offer total support to the loan applicant right from the moment he logs into their website. They collect his personal details and determine his eligibility, call him back to answer his queries and collect documents, and follow up with the bank for processing and sanction of the loan.

Here is how it works

1. Customer searches for ‘Personal Loan’ in a search engine, the result show up several third party websites or banks/financial institutions
2. Customer goes to the website and enters in his personal details
3. He can view a number of lenders and can compare interest rates and eligibility criteria
4. The website’s customer care representative calls back the applicant to answer any queries and to inform about documents required
5. The customer scans and submits necessary documents
6. The customer is then informed of his application status updates via email and SMS
7. The Personal Loan is processed
8. The customer can post his experience online to help other applicants in their search

The USP of these sites therefore, is easy comparison of interest rates/eligibility criteria/ repayment period so that the customer makes an informed choice. The proactive follow up by these websites also enrich the customer experience and significantly reduce his effort in obtaining a personal loan.

Further, these third party sites do not charge any fees for their services and sometimes provide special discounts or offers to the customer for applying a personal loan through their websites. Many of them are launching their mobile apps as well, which enable the customers to apply for a personal loan on the go.

So in case you have not experienced these innovative services, you can just enter “personal loans” on Google or any other popular search engine and apply through any of the third-party websites that show up. You are sure to get hooked to the easy and fast application process and recommend it to others for its sheer convenience.