The SME Lender: Manish Lunia, Co- Founder, Flexiloans Having faced events such as Demonetization, GST, IL&FS Crisis, and Covid-19, Lunia and the startup believe that in every crisis there is a hidden opportunity waiting to be capitalized upon
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You're reading Entrepreneur India, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Did you know that over 80% of loan proposals from SMEs currently are rejected by institutional channels on account of inadequate financial history or collaterals. With an aim to solve the problem that SMEs face in accessing quick, flexible & adequate funds for growing their business, Manish Lunia, Ritesh Jain, and Abhishek Kothari founded FlexiLoans.com an online lending platform for SMEs and have made it into one of the leading players in the space.
"We believe our technology-powered online marketplace is the best model to meet the financial requirements of SMEs who do not have a credit history & hence cannot avail loans from traditional banking channels. This is further substantiated by the fact that more than 50% of our borrowers are First Time Business Loan Borrowers," says Manish Lunia, Co- Founder, Flexiloans.com.
He further reminisces, "During my journey with one of the leading NBFCs in the country when it was in its nascent stage, and the portfolio had stagnated at around INR 500 crore, we were given the mandate to turn it around and we managed to take the portfolio to INR 4,500 crore in 3 years. This has been my inspiration to date and consequently, we are now INR 2,000 crore at FlexiLoans as well."
Having faced events such as Demonetization, GST, IL&FS Crisis, and Covid-19, Lunia and the startup believe that in every crisis there is a hidden opportunity waiting to be capitalized upon. It is stepping up its efforts to retain customers through Quick Approvals, Interactive Customer Application Journeys, Interest rates as low as 1% per month, Special Pricing for Topups and Renewals, a Specialized Customer Support team with revert within 30 minutes, and Continuous Engagement by communicating latest offers.
"Currently almost 50% of our customers take more than one loan from us which further proves our ability to retain our customers," shares Lunia. They've also started Invoice Discounting as a product (Supply Chain Vendor Financing) which is in a way quasi-secured product as its receivable is secured due to escrow created with the Anchor. "In future we plan to launch a secured product as well to further diversify the portfolio. Pilot is already underway for the same and we are seeing impressive results. This will help us become a 3 product company in the future with synergy and cross-sell opportunities across 3 products," he concludes. At present, it is able to only service about 5,000 loans a month against 3l akh leads monthly. Lunia feels the upcoming products will help them increase throughput.
Factsheet:
Funding received: 350 cr. in Equity
Year of inception: 2016
No of employees: 500+
No. of app downloads: 5 lakh+
Current Turnover: 300 cr+
