With an aim to use new-age technology to provide quick and transparent funding access to millions of deserving small businesses, four batchmates of ISB (Indian School of Business) started Flexiloans.com in April 2016.
The digital lending platform’s target is small businesses that are currently underserved and rely on informal sources of funding. One of the founders of Flexiloans.com, Abhishek Kothari, says that they have digitally processed more than 10,000 applications till date, with an average ticket size of Rs 5 lakh.
“Our focus is strictly on the SME segment which is credit-starved and needs to be pulled into the formal economy in order to grow faster. We may acquire customers through various channels and partnerships, but our focus will continue to be on core Indian SMEs. We are trying to solve a problem that exists, rather than compete in a segment that is already served by banks,” Kothari says.
Recently, the startup acquired CreditPeriod.com, in order to strengthen its position in supply chain financing for the SME ecosystem, which is still in the early adopter phase.
“The acquisition forms a crucial part of our exercise to digitise the end-to-end supply chain finance vertical for SMEs. We will continue to acquire companies that can accelerate our go-to-market plans by providing extendable technologies as well as the right talent to join us,” he adds.
The startup offers various products such as Working Capital Loans, Loan against POS transactions, Supply Chain Finance and Line of Credit. “These products focus on providing credit to all sectors in the SME category, at the same time, we try and ensure digitisation by the in-house technological capabilities we have,” he adds.
After Flexiloans.com raised Rs 100 crore from a marquee set of investors, its growth has been skyrocketing. “We currently lend to SMEs in over 70 cities with a 48-hour processing time, and our aim is to dramatically increase our distribution to more than 500 cities with an average processing time of less than 24 hours. Our long-term vision is to provide financial access at a click to small business owners,” he says.
He adds, “In the next few years, we aim to be a data science and machine learning-enabled lending company with deep penetration in tier II cities.”
According to various reports, India currently has over 50 million SMEs that contribute to 45% of the nation’s GDP. “Of these, more than 85% are underserved as per our research, and more than half will have some digital or online footprint by 2020,” he says, adding that the platform uses several traditional and non-traditional sources of data to score an applicant, which means that each applicant’s score is unique in keeping with the loan amount and profile of that applicant.
Published 02 July 2017, 17:32 IST