MSME lender Lendingkart’s disbursement jumps 85% in FY20; backs Covid-hit firms under govt’s ECLGS

Credit and Finance for MSMEs: MSME lender Lendingkart on Thursday said that its disbursement for the financial year (FY) 2020 has increased around 85 per cent to about 53,000 loans involving Rs 2,500 crore from FY19. Company’s Assets Under Management (AUM) as of FY20-end stood at around Rs 2,400 crores, growing by 80 per cent during the said FY. Founded in 2014, Lendingkart has made cumulative disbursals totalling Rs 5,500 crores since inception to over 90,000 MSMEs. It also leveraged the Modi government’s credit guarantee scheme for lending to MSMEs. “We have done (lending through the Emergency Credit Line Guarantee Scheme) where our customers have asked us. We have been proactive in participating in the moratorium and in all the government schemes for MSMEs,” Harshvardhan Lunia, Managing Director & Co-Founder, Lendingkart told Financial Express Online.

Over the last six-seven months of Covid followed by the lockdown and unlock phases, the company said it has been prepared for the scenario given that one of its largest investors has China business with almost 20-30 per cent business coming from Wuhan. “In February itself, we started getting signals and we started preparing for this. Another strong point that stood out for us was that we are only NBFC where the entire portfolio is covered by the guarantee from the Government of India,” added Lunia.

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Lendingkart counts Singapore’s Fullerton Financial Holdings  (FFH), Saama Capital, Mayfield India, India Quotient, Bertelsmann India Investments, and Sistema Asia Fund among its investors with FFH being the largest shareholder. The company had last raised series D funding round in May this year for Rs 319 crore and overall raised Rs 1,050 crore in equity funding so far.

Lendingkart’s customers are essentially last-mile businesses such as a mobile seller, retailer, computer academy, apparel seller etc. Lunia claimed that most of these businesses have started gaining momentum with their revenues gradually increasing even as there has been no drop in demand for them. The company said that had secured upgrade in Credit rating to A-/ Stable Outlook during lockdown period. Lendingkart underwrites loans based on alternate customer data such as bank data and GST data to estimate the customer creditworthiness. The underwriting is based on its proprietary machine-learning model working on nearly more than 5,000 variables for each loan.