Credit and Finance for MSMEs: Social media platform Facebook India today announced the launch of collateral-free of charge loans for tiny and medium companies (SMBs) to allow simple access to credit.
The loans will be processed and disbursed by way of Facebook’s programme companion Gurugram-based lending firm Indifi Technologies.
Indifi is the initially lending companion and more such partnerships are on the cards, stated Ajit Mohan, VP and MD Facebook India in the course of the press conference.
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On the launch, Mohan added, “We want to leverage the fact that Facebook for most of these businesses is a window to the world, they invariably have a Facebook presence and are advertising on Facebook…..there’s an opportunity for us to leverage that knowledge, and our connect with small businesses can help them get access to credit from lenders who are partners of ours and are willing to lean in.”
The loans will be in the variety of Rs 5 lakh and Rs 50 lakh charged at a pre-defined interest price of 17%-20% per annum. Women entrepreneurs will be charged .2% significantly less interest. This facility is presently accessible for companies across 200 Indian cities and the strategy is to raise the attain as more partners onboard the programme.
Facebook does not have any monetary advantage from these partnerships and
tiny companies are not obligated to commit their loan quantity on Facebook marketing.
In addition, it is also not significant for the tiny companies to be an advertiser on the Facebook apps: Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram, stated Mohan. The rationale, he stated, is “we see that as these businesses will grow and have enough revenue they will probably use our solutions that may benefit us in the long term and we’re totally fine with it.” According to the business, out of the total 200 million enterprise customers on Facebook apps, 10 million are advertisers.
Last year in the course of the pandemic, Facebook had announced a $one hundred million international grant out of which more than $4 million was deployed in India for 3000 tiny companies.