Sugee.io
Rural finance, rebuilt for people the banks had written off.
- Role
- Product Designer, end to end
- Year
- 2024
- Platform
- Web and Android
- Tools
- Figma, Design Systems, React, Tailwind
- 800K+Rural customers
- ₹1,500Cr+Transactions processed
- 600+Bank branches
- 16 wkDesign to launch
The problem
Around 600 million people in rural India borrow through cooperative banks and PACS. Almost every one of those institutions still runs on paper ledgers, spreadsheets and WhatsApp groups.
So a loan decision takes weeks. Farmers have no credit history to point at. Nobody can see risk until it has already happened.
- Paper loan records
- No farmer credit history
- Patchy rural connectivity
- 600+ disconnected banks
- Feature phone constraints
How it went
16 weeks- 01
Research
Weeks 1 to 3I sat with bank officers and farmers across Maharashtra and watched how the work actually gets done, not how the manual says it does.
24 interviews, field notes - 02
Architecture
Weeks 4 to 6Seven roles, seven different jobs. I mapped what each one needs to see before anything got drawn.
Role matrix, flows - 03
Design system
Weeks 6 to 11A 300+ component library so seven dashboards and an app could be built without redrawing the same thing seven times.
300+ components - 04
Build and ship
Weeks 11 to 16Handoff, QA on real devices in low signal, and staying close through launch.
Live in 600+ branches
From paper to a platform
SETU is the operational side of Sugee. Seven dashboards, one for each role. Makers raise loans, checkers approve them, branch officers run their territory, society admins watch a PACS portfolio, and the MD sees the whole network.
Every role gets its own view and its own level of detail. That sounds obvious. It is the thing most enterprise tools get wrong, because they ship one screen and let everyone squint at it.
- Loan origination
- Credit scoring
- Geo intelligence
- B2B SaaS, desktop
SETU
A bank that fits in a pocket
The person using this is reading Marathi on a four inch screen with 2G signal. That single sentence decided most of the design.
Loan status in one tap. Repayment schedule you can read at arm's length. Everything in the language people actually think in.
- Android
- Marathi and Hindi
- Works on bad signal
- Accessibility first
Farmer app
Where it got to
- 800K+Rural customersFarmers and small businesses
- ₹1,500Cr+Transactions processedRoughly $180M
- 600+Branches on the platformCo-ops, RRBs and PACS
- 81K+Loans facilitatedOrigination to disbursal
A visual language built for trust
- Sugee GreenPrimary#1A6B3C
- Harvest AmberAction#F5A623
- Alert RedExpense#E84040
- Deep ForestDark surfaces#0B1F14
- MintTints#D6EFE0
Type: Urbanist
We needed a product that a bank officer in Nashik and a farmer in Satara could both use confidently. That is exactly what we got.
The result
Sixteen weeks from first interview to live. Two products, SETU for the institutions and the app for the farmers, running across 600+ branches and more than ₹1,500 crore in rural credit.
Sugee was later incubated at Plaksha University, picked for Action for India's Agri Cohort 2024 to 2025, and taken into the Frictionless Finance Accelerator.