Credit and Finance for MSMEs: The Gurugram-based online lending platform Indifi Technologies on Wednesday announced that the second quarter of financial year (FY) 2021-22 was its best ever quarter with loan volumes crossing pre-Covid levels.
The company said it reached the Rs 500 asset-under-management (AUM) milestone for Q2 FY22, up by 43 per cent from the earlier quarter. The rise was attributed to the growth in segments such as e-commerce, pharma, and retail that saw a 30 per cent increase in average loan size.
In addition, the company launched shorter tenure products to cater to wider use cases of customers’ borrowing requirements such as Buy Now Pay Later and early settlement financing. “Shorter tenure, higher frequency products is one area where we have expanded as they carry lower risk and also because we were not serving this use case earlier,” Alok Mittal, Cofounder and CEO, Indifi told TheSpuzz Online.
The number of loans also saw an uptick. “For most lending companies, including ours, the number of borrowers reduced during Covid. So, we went down but have now made up for that loss,” said Mittal.
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Since its inception, the firm had focused on lending to industry-specific small businesses such as restaurants, e-commerce sellers, and retailers in groceries and electronics amongst others. During the pandemic, Indifi included pharmaceutical retailers and distributors to its array as spending on healthcare increased.
Aditya Harkauli, Chief Business Officer, Indifi said in a statement, “Our continued reliance on a deeply verticalised and segment-specific underwriting/ account management approach, helped to pick up and assess the differential impact of Covid-related disruptions across borrower segments.” More than 80 per cent of Indifi’s business came through partnerships with firms such as Meta (formerly Facebook), Swiggy, Zomato, First Data, Google Pay while the remaining was through direct channels such as website and its recently launched mobile app. The firm had partnered with over 100 businesses, of which 50 were active on the platform.
Indifi offered business loans in the range of Rs 1 lakh to Rs 50 lakh to small businesses with an average ticket size of Rs 6 lakhs. Over the last five years, the company had disbursed 40,000 loans amounting to Rs 17,000 crores.