About
Nepal has lenders. It needs lending infrastructure.
There is no shortage of institutions in Nepal legally permitted to lend. What most of them lack is the software to do it digitally — and building it in-house is a commitment few boards will make. That gap is the whole reason Khepee exists.
The starting question
We began by asking whether we could lend independently
The honest answer was no — and working out exactly why produced the architecture. A software company in Nepal cannot lend on its own account without becoming a licensed financial institution, which means crores of paid-up capital and full prudential compliance.
- Own licence: NPR 2 crore for a district microfinance licence, up to NPR 80 crore for a national finance company
- Peer-to-peer: not currently permitted — a consultative document and a white paper, but no regulation
- Technology service provider: legal today, no capital, no licence application
- We chose the third, and designed so the first stays reachable later
The decision
Being the rails is not a consolation prize
It would be easy to present the TSP model as a compromise. It is not. Almost everything a lending platform actually does — the borrower experience, the decisioning, the servicing, the evidence — sits with us. What sits with the partner is precisely the part that requires a licence and a balance sheet.
- We build and operate the entire technology stack
- The partner brings the licence, the capital and the credit policy
- No fund custody means a far smaller compliance surface for everyone
- The multi-tenant core serves a future licence holder unchanged
Principles
Six commitments we have written into the code
These are not values on a wall. Each one corresponds to a specific mechanism, and breaking any of them would take a reviewable code change rather than a bad day.
Never touch the money
The payment interface has no method that could move funds into an account we control. Not policy — architecture.
Never claim a licence we do not hold
No “NRB approved”, no implied regulation. The partner’s licence is the partner’s, and we say so.
Never see borrower data
Our own admin role is not granted permission to read borrower personal data. Support runs on request ids.
Never let a rule be quietly removed
Compliance-critical logic is covered by tests that block the release if they fail.
Never make leaving expensive
Full structured export at any time. We would rather be chosen each year than depended on.
Never pressure a borrower
No contacts, no location, no photo access. The permissions are blocked in the app, not merely unused.
The market
Who this is actually for
The institutions with the weakest digital capability are usually the ones closest to the borrowers who need credit most. That is where a platform like this changes something real rather than shaving days off an already-fast process.
- Class B and C institutions competing against faster incumbents
- Class D microfinance institutions whose field model works but whose paperwork does not
- Institutions whose core banking roadmap has no room for a lending project
- Borrowers who would rather not spend three days visiting a branch
How we work
We would rather lose a deal than misdescribe one
A partner’s compliance function verifies every regulatory claim a vendor makes. A claim that fails that check does not just lose the deal — it damages the institution that repeated it. So we say only what is true, including when the answer is unhelpful.
- We publish what we have not done yet, including the absence of a penetration test
- We state where a cooperative’s regulatory position differs from a bank’s
- We name the dependencies whose failure becomes your outage
- If we are the wrong tool for your institution, we will say so
Where we are
Pre-launch, and specific about it
Khepee has not launched. Here is what exists today and what comes next.
Done
Foundation
Multi-tenancy, identity and access control, the regulatory constants, the state machine and its compliance tests.
In progress
Core lending flow
KYC workflow, loan products, origination and the officer console.
Next
Decisioning and disbursement
Scorecard, disbursement orchestration and reconciliation against a real partner’s rails.
Then
Servicing and reporting
Schedules, collections, NRB extracts, and an independent security review before any production borrower data exists.
Launch
First partner live
A controlled pilot with a licensed institution, with their officers deciding every case.
Khepee is a technology service provider, not a lender
Khepee is operated by Lacspace Corporation Pvt. Ltd. It is not a bank or financial institution, does not lend, does not accept deposits and does not hold customer funds. Lending is carried out by partner institutions licensed by Nepal Rastra Bank. Lacspace’s company registration is a technology-company registration and confers no lending authority; Khepee makes no claim of NRB licensing, approval, registration or endorsement.
Coming soon
We are looking for the first few partners
Early partners get more of our attention than any later cohort will, and more influence over what gets built next.