Digital Payment Platform: Indifi Technologies Solves Financial Gap
The goal of a domestic fintech startup Indifi Technologies Solves financial gap to provide small businesses with easy, quick, and personalised access to credit in order to help them grow. It’s a digital lending platform that provides loans to firms who are underserved yet have good credit. This is made feasible by placing technology at the core of its operations. By harnessing the power of AI, analytics, and machine learning, Indifi circumvents difficulties that traditional lenders encounter.
According to Alok Mittal the co-founder and CEO of Indifi Technologies, “At the beginning, we focused on getting our foundation and essential offerings correct, and only then did we look to scale”. Up to this point, we have provided 63,000+ loans to 30,000+ MSMEs in 450+ cities. We have surpassed Rs. 1,400 crore AUM and our disbursals are still increasing month over month. Of of all the loans issued, 30% went to enterprises that had never received credit before and 20% went to women business owners. As of now, we have onboarded more than 20 lending partners in addition to more than 80 ecosystem partners. This enables us to advance our goal of promoting financial inclusion by providing fast, inexpensive, and accessible loans, says Mittal.
The MSME sector has been and will continue to be a crucial part of India’s growth story due to its sizable market. According to Mittal, the total credit shortfall is about Rs 25 trillion in the Indian MSME sector. An MSME must satisfy a fixed set of criteria imposed by traditional lenders before they can be approved for loan; these criteria include the number of years the business has been in operation, ITRs, credit history, etc.
As it became evident that technology and the digital revolution could be used to tackle these major issues and enable credit for the underserved MSMEs, Indifi was founded in 2015. Since Indifi’s beginning, our mission has been constant, and we will keep pushing for the inclusion of disadvantaged MSMEs. This will be done by doubling down on our IT processes and improving our core offering to provide smooth digital client journey, underwriting at a company level, and speedier disbursals, says Mittal.
According to Mittal, the company has received institutional finance in four rounds from Accel, Elevar, Omidyar Networks, CDC, CX Partners, and Finnfund, with the series D round of $26 million coming in November 2021.
THE WORLD IS DIGITAL
Technology has been at the front and core of Indifi’s operations. “It is through this that we seek to drive credit inclusion, we do not have a feet-on-street model,” says Mittal. “The credit journey of our customers is totally digital, from the time that they make the decision to apply for a business loan to when the amount hits their account. This means they can do the entire exercise from the comfort of their homes/ offices without stepping out”.
Indifi has long-standing relationships with top digital ecosystems in a variety of industries (including e-commerce, retail, food, travel, and payments), and as a result, has extensive system integrations that enable the company to obtain more data sets. These data sets give us information that will enable us to analyse the risk and credit worthiness of a business, and they are what allow us to help underserved MSMEs. Additionally, we use machine learning tools and a unique underwriting algorithm that is based on more than 5000 data points to perform our underwriting. To further ensure seamless client journeys, we implement the most recent technological connections like Account Aggregator, E-KYC, and ENACH, says Mittal.