Indifi | SME Loans: Indifi’s online marketplace for unsecured SME loans grows 200% YoY

Indifi Technologies announced the milestone of over 200% year-over-year growth in loan amount disbursed through partner lenders in December 2021. In addition, Indifi also saw 100% growth in the number of loans disbursed from December 2020 to December 2021. Indifi doubled its lending partners in the last 12 months. To maintain this growth momentum, Indifi is aiming to grow its lender partnership-led business by 100% in 2022 and onboard at least three new lending partners itself in Q1 22, including a renowned private bank and public sector banks.

These numbers are the result of several factors. Indifi takes an ecosystem-based approach to lending, which enables synergies to be created between demand and supply partners. Indifi leverages partnerships with tech aggregators like Zomato, Amazon, Swiggy, Facebook, etc. to enable embedded lending solutions for the underserved but creditworthy small business owners registered on their platform. This allows lenders on Indifi’s platform business to integrate once and gain access to over 50 small business ecosystems, increasing their reach in highly volatile segments and smaller cities that they otherwise would not have served. And with its data-driven underwriting and collections offerings, Indifi has achieved high collection efficiencies for its lending partners, even during the pandemic. Indifi has enabled end-to-end digitized lending, data analysis, credit modeling and collections, and has built immense trust in its future-ready and customer-centric solutions among its lending partners.

Commenting on this milestone, Siddharth Mahanot, Co-Founder and COO of Indifi Technologies: “At Indifi, we are committed to solving access to credit for 65 million MSMEs in India and we know that technology and data is the fastest way to do it are. As a platform, we try to bridge the gap between underserved MSMEs and lenders. Through partnerships on both the demand and supply sides of the credit spectrum, we are able to leverage lenders’ low-cost capital as well as leverage technology and MSME data in ecosystem platforms to break down the MSME lending barriers. It is this digital-first and data-driven strategy that has helped unlock these growth numbers despite the ongoing pandemic.”

Its verticalized and segment-specific underwriting and account management approach also helps assess the differential impact of COVID-related disruptions on different borrower segments. This helps lenders focus on segments and borrower profiles of their choice. Second, the restrictions on mobility due to the pandemic caused MSME borrowers to look for unavailable ways to meet their borrowing needs.

It has enhanced the convenience of fully digital lending for borrowers with features like CKYC/OKYC, E-Sign, Video Sign, E-NACH, etc., further maintaining payout volume. Deep technical integrations with lenders have resulted in a reduction in manual intervention and automated processes such as agreement approval, quotes and even revised quotes, providing MSME customers with a seamless credit experience.

Currently, Indifi has nine lenders active on the platform, which are a mix of banks, NBFCs, and P2P lenders. Five of these lenders, including DMI Finance, Caspian Impact Investment and Ugro Capital, were added in 2021 and have grown rapidly. It has successfully facilitated access to capital for MSMEs in segments such as e-commerce, retail, restaurants and more in 400 cities. Most of these providers are located in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, including female entrepreneurs, that are otherwise geographically and analytically inaccessible to traditional lenders.