Lendingkart Joins Hands With Tata Capital To Boost India’s MSME Lending Play

Fintech startup Lendingkart has partnered with Tata Group’s financial services arm Tata Capital Limited to offer unsecured business loans to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs).

Lendingkart said in a statement that this partnership with Tata Capital is aimed at enhancing lending access for MSMEs across the country through its SaaS platform 2gthr.

2gthr currently oversees a customer’s financial journey, including application initiation, efficient underwriting, disbursal processes and seamless collections management.

Lendingkart claimed that its portal 2gthr has disbursed over 300,000 loans, and it has partnered with about 30 financial institutions including Tata Capital, on its co-lending mission.

In May, the Ahmedabad-based company raised $10 Mn (INR 83.5 Cr) via external commercial borrowing from a fund managed by Swiss impact investor BlueOrchard, to deploy the freshly raised funding for onward lending activities to MSMEs.

Founded in 2014 by Harshvardhan Lunia and Mukul Sachan, Lendingkart is a digital lending platform, which offers various kinds of loans for entrepreneurs, MSMEs, apart from personal loans.

“Our goal is to enhance credit penetration and make financing accessible and easier for MSMEs. This partnership will help us address the critical financing requirements of underserved businesses and drive greater operational efficiencies,” Lunia, cofounder and CEO at Lendingkart said.

This new development comes at a time when the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) modified the master directions (MD) for non-banking financial company-peer to peer (NBFC-P2P) lending platforms, in the past week.

In a notification, the RBI said that it tightened the norms to curb certain practices adopted by NBFC-P2P platforms such as violation of the prescribed funds transfer mechanism, promoting P2P lending as an investment product with features like tenure linked assured minimum returns, among others.

However, the stricter norms and regulations have not seemed to crack the motto of fintech companies to strengthen their market presence through forging new partnerships and product launches in recent times.

For instance, fintech unicorn Cred partnered with non-banking financial company (NBFC) L&T Finance to offer unsecured personal loans to customers, earlier this week. 

In a statement, the NBFC arm of the construction giant said that the loans will be disbursed through the “CRED Cash” offering. The new product will be rolled out in partnership with CRED’s NBFC NewTap Finance and L&T Finance. 

Meanwhile, Lendingkart also partnered with Yubi Group, formerly known as CredAvenue, to co-lend business loans to MSMEs through 2gthr, over a year ago.