Easing MSMEs' Working Capital Woes with Data Bhatia confident of their co-lending segment leading to growth

"Lendingkart's mission is to simplify finance for MSMEs. Lendingkart today has built a digital tech-driven framework that integrates all the stakeholders via a common platform, enabling collaboration across the financial services ecosystem," says Manish Bhatia, President, Tech & Abilities, Lendingkart Technologies Private Limited.

"Over the years, Lendingkart has identified and built the technology to bridge the gap between the lenders and the borrowers thereby creating different products for different stages of digital lending. Our first product 2gthr, is a B2B SaaS platform where we integrate originators and co-lenders to facilitate loans for customers across 5,000-plus pincodes in India while simultaneously expanding our ability to disburse more loans by tying up with lending partners. Lendingkart 2gthr tries to match a customer to the best loan offer he can get in the fastest possible time. We do this using our own underwriting model plus a proprietary rule engine which matches the customer to the best loan offer from our several lending partners. We have more than 20 marquee banks and NBFCs as our partners - Bank of Maharashtra, Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank among others."

"Our next product is known as Lendingkart Xlr8. Xlr8 stands for accelerating growth of Channel partners and DSAs on the platform by distributing products of financial institutions PAN India. Xlr8 offers one single platform for all sourcing partners to get onboarded without reaching out to multiple FIs, track payments and invoices in one system without any hassle and undergo all high quality trainings to be successful in distributing products. Xlr8 has an API suite that can be used by channel partners to pass leads to FIs and it also has a mobile app to encourage DSA agents to log in files across various products to FIs," added Bhatia

"We have also created an underwriting based proprietary tool known as Lendingkart Cred8 as a service to financial institutions to find credit worthy applicants. It is built on three main tenets -

• Speed: Cred8 offers fastest risk decision-making with a turnaround time of 90 seconds.
• Accuracy: Cred8 provides tenure based maximum loan exposed based on proprietary affordability variables.
• Simplicity: With a single three-digit score range of 300-900 and a single letter risk grade, credit managers can quickly ascertain the risk associated with a given applicant," stated Bhatia

"Another proprietary product known as Lendingkart Collec10 offers seamless, non-intrusive digital debt collections. This is a Business-to-Business platform that is meant for any institutions involved in debt collections. Lenders who have disbursed loans or collection agencies who are involved in debt collections can leverage this platform which offers both digital and physical collections over more than 7,000 pincodes in India. We offer both Software-as-a-Service and Collection-as-a-Service," said Bhatia.

"Another service that we have built over the years is known as Zero-Touch or Self-serve journey for loan application. Without human interaction, a borrower can apply for an unsecured business loan through zero-touch in less than 5 minutes. Apart from this, we have been early adopters of Account Aggregator platform (by Sahamati) - a single click platform that allows for submission of bank statements for the borrowers. We have so far downloaded 50 per cent of the bank statements through this platform, with user consent," stated Bhatia.

"Lendingkart's technology-first approach is a proof of the importance given to innovation. Lendingkart has paved the 'digital' way forward by being the enabler of a comprehensive financial ecosystem collaboration. This has helped Lendingkart build a digital tech-driven framework that integrates all the stakeholders via a common platform. Lendingkart has been successful in initiating collaborations across the financial services ecosystem," said Bhatia.

"On the impact their fintech has made, Bhatia says, "So far, we have given loans worth INR 11,500 crore to more than 1,70,000 MSMEs. Our pan-india reach is around 12,000 pincodes (India has a total of 19,000 pincodes) across 4,000-plus towns and cities. Lendingkart has built one of the largest MSME databases in the country with 7 billion data points for over 200,000 MSMEs."

"With more than 65 million MSMEs in the country who are responsible for creation of the trillion dollar economy, it is imperative to put them on the financial map. Lendingkart products and services have helped the NTC and thin-file customers be able to access a business loan, thus contributing to the goal and upliftment of MSMEs for financial inclusion."

Speaking of the difficulty to reach the path of profitability, says Bhatia, "For any business, being successful in making profits are directly proportionate on developing best products/services to create a wow factor to our customers by delivering the solutions quickly, keeping in mind 'time to market' and taking care of 'return on investment' with frugal innovation, spend on right areas by deploying right size of teams and technology to deliver customer-obsessive products. There is no magic wand to make it happen, this requires dedicated efforts, a customer-focused approach and right leadership and team that leads to great products, happy customers and profitable businesses."

To stay ahead and relevant in a constantly changing marketplace, Bhatia says, "It is important to change as per the changing times. We have from very early on understood that the future of lending is digital and are constantly working to ensure seamless borrowing and lending in the financial ecosystem. Because we are obsessed with our customers, we keep working on building products best suited to their needs. This is the age of customisation and by collecting data that is relevant for better customer understanding, we are finessing our products to create customised solutions for our partners and borrowers. Constantly being up-to-date with market trends help in analyse our positioning and work on improvements. We have built ourselves as a platform - by diversifying our portfolio as an NBFC. Rigorous testing and thorough research has helped us to identify opportunities to add more to our existing offerings. For example, we are expanding to offering other services such as gold loans etc."

On their growth plans for the next two years Bhatia says, "The last few quarters, we have seen our co-lending and platform business accelerate. In 2019-20, we disbursed about INR 170 crore via co-lending which has increased manifolds in 2021-22 with over INR 1,300 crore last year. This year we already have a book of INR 4,000 crore disbursals through co-lending. We are in the process of adding new partners and our business for the next year is already pre-sold. We have been profitable for the fourth quarter straight in this year and we plan to go public in the next six to eight quarters."