Digital lender KreditBee aims to hit assets under management of $1 billon in the next six months, co-founder and chief executive officer Madhusudan Ekambaram said. Currently, the lender’s assets under management stand around `5,000 crore or nearly $604 million.
As of now, the company is focusing on providing both secured and unsecured loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). It has various retail loan products like personal loans, gold loans, vehicle loans and home loans.
“It does not make sense for me to offer a product and then look for a customer because there are already a lot of customers,” Ekambaram said. “Initially, the middle class customer base look for a personal loan, then they are looking for a gold or a vehicle loan, and then migrate to a home loan. On the self-employed side, they look for a working capital loan or a business loan because that is the natural progression for them.”
KreditBee launched working capital loans for SMEs earlier this month. The ticket size of the unsecured loans in this category is capped at 5 lakh, and loans above5 lakh come under the secured category.
“We have been a digital team so far, where a lot of the underwriting was totally digital. But, within the SME sector, there will be an element of physical also. We will be venturing into the phygital model in order to accommodate the process involved in underwriting for the SME product,”
he said.
In fact, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has tightened the screw on digital lenders when disbursals of these loans have seen a rise in recent times.
“We have been an NBFC all this while. So, the RBI’s 2021 digital lending guidelines did not pinch us a lot. But definitely, pure-play platform companies have been forced to look for an NBFC licence, come under the supervision of the regulator and operate,” Ekambaram said. “On the long term, the guidelines are stabilizing but definitely there have been some short term pains with few of the lenders in the market.”
Broadly, KreditBee disburses loans worth more than 1,350 crore on a monthly basis by providing unsecured loans to salaried and self-employed individuals, the company’s bread and butter product. The average ticket size for salaried individuals is around40,000-45,000 and that for self-employed individuals is around `20,000-25,000. The average tenure for these loans is seven-eight months.
Around 70% of the company’s customer base resides in non-metro cities. A majority of these customers are employees of small and medium-sized enterprises or government employees.
Recently, the Bengaluru-based company raised $80 million from Premji Invest, Motilal Oswal Alternates, NewQuest Capital Partners, Mirae Asset Ventures, and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Bank in the first tranche of the Series D funding round.
The company will conduct the second tranche of this investment round in the next few weeks.
