With a dream to revolutionize business lending in India, Capital Float provides loans to small businesses
The Indian business environment is exciting especially now, where every bright idea is turning into a business, big or small. There are over 30 million SMEs in India. Small businesses are run by passionate entrepreneurs, but unlike digital startups, venture capital money is not accessible to them. Despite efforts, some of these businesses are losing out on growth or shut shop due to lack of working capital.
With a dream to revolutionise business lending in India, Gaurav Hinduja and Shashank Rishyasringa are changing the business of money lending with Capital Float.
Initially, Shashank was an engagement manager at McKinsey & Company, where he advised several leading financial institutions, investment funds, governments and foundations on business strategy, governance, operations and risk management. Co-founder Gaurav was running operations at India’s big apparel manufacturer Gokaldas Exports with over 40,000 people and USD 250 million in revenues.
The duo were at Stanford together before they co-founded Capital Float. They considered various business ideas but doing something related to capital was a natural inclination for them. So they decided to take on the money lending problem for small businesses.
How Capital Float works?
According to Gaurav, Capital Float works in three basic steps:
- Customer has to apply online,
- Submit documents,
- He/she gets a loan if eligible in about three days.
Yes, just three days for loan!
He adds, “We make sure to go through as many data points as available, including external data sources to determine credit worthiness. Once we have established that, we have been able to disburse a loan in under three days and in a lot of cases where the loan is small, it happens instantaneously. In the future, we hope to reduce that time for disbursal even further.”
Team Capital Float understands the importance of friendly capital, and is quick to deliver that much-needed finance to promising businesses that approach them. It is rare in India that a small business can get a loan in such a short time from any traditional finance company. Gaurav says, “Besides the swiftness and hassle-free nature of our service, one of the key USP is that we do not charge a prepayment penalty and our products have dynamic tenures that suit our customer's needs.”
Key Challenges and Motivation
Starting up always comes with its set of challenges. At Capital Float, they went through the motions like everyone else: from the initial days of hiring the right team to defining clear goals, to ensuring compliance.
For startups, challenges are part of the larger scheme of things to survive and grow. Capital Float is an RBI-certified NBFC but registration was not an easy task. "At one point, we almost quit and took a break for a couple of months. But we understood regulation is very important in a complex market like India and we got back on track and persisted with our goals”, says Gaurav.
Gaurav shares how the company started conversations with their customers in the early days: “Most traditional loan providers find reasons to say 'no' to an entrepreneur looking for capital, but we look for a reason to say yes."
The company has come a long way now; it is serving in major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai and has testimonials from CFO of Zovi and other big brands.
According to Gaurav, today’s SMEs will drive tomorrow’s billion dreams. "But we need to ask ourselves who the driving and supporting force behind such SMEs are today,” he adds. The dream to revolutionise business lending in the country has kept Gaurav and Shashank going. "The fact that we get close to a hundred applications a day vindicates our belief in what we set out to do: create a capital revolution in India,” says Gaurav.
Being an entrepreneur himself in the fin-tech domain, Gaurav believes that entrepreneurs form the backbone of the Indian economy as the creators of the largest number of jobs and biggest contributors to the GDP. A significant hurdle for most of them is timely access to appropriate finance.
He shares some advice for entrepreneurs working in the financial domain and other budding startups:
- Compliance is key; never ignore it
- You should choose investors who share your vision
- Don’t give up easily; starting up can initially wear you out but it should not bring you down
- Don’t always hire for skills. Sometimes it’s important to hire for values
- Don’t make promises to the customer that you cannot deliver on
- Don’t launch your product in too many markets at once. Have a soft launch first, test it, tweak it and then re-launch the revised product
Gaurav adds, “There are many banks and NBFCs which provide loans to businesses, but you need to become a partner to your customer, not a lender. Use technology and big data to improve your customer’s experience. Understand how different customers use your products in different markets so that you can customise your product to meet their needs.”