This startup is reimagining financial access for India’s blue-collar workforce

In a country where millions of low-income workers silently power the economy, their financial and healthcare needs are often overlooked by traditional systems. Access to a personal loan, an insurance plan, and even government health schemes sometimes remain a distant dream. It is here that a Mumbai-headquartered fintech startup wants to rewrite the rules by creating packages that meet their needs.

Entitled Solutions, founded by Anshul Khurana, Arpan Jain, Krishna Yadav in 2020, is an inclusion platform that aims to make health and financial services accessible to urban low-income workers.

By connecting employers, financiers, and healthcare service providers, the company has built an ecosystem where the low-income or blue-collar workers are not an afterthought, but the focal point.

For example, if a low-income worker earns around Rs 15,000-20,000 a month and urgently requires a personal loan of Rs 50,000, it is nearly impossible that any bank or NBFC will be able to provide a loan.

This is the challenge that Entitled Solutions wants to solve by developing customised products for low-income workers.

Before launching the startup, the three co-founders worked at Grand Resource Factory, a personalised services startup, where they saw first-hand the challenges faced by blue-collar workers.

“We give them (blue collar workers) access to basic financial products and government health schemes,” says Anshul Khurana, CEO, Entitled Solutions.

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What it offers?

Entitled Solutions provides its customers salary advances, personal loans, health insurance, and even two-wheeler loans.

“We curate our products which are highly customised,” he says. He further notes that Entitled Solutions never provides standard insurance products to its customers.

The startup has partnered with 80 different kinds of enterprises which largely employ blue-collar workers. These include companies like Quess, Swiggy, SIS, and Domino’s to name a few.

“These employers find it beneficial to be on our platform as it helps them retain their workers,” says Khurana. In addition, there is also a mandatory requirement for many of these enterprises to provide health cover to their employees.

The startup creates a digital credit profile of the borrower using employer-sourced data and WhatsApp-based communication. These interactions provide the much-needed insights on the requirements of these workers and the acceptance level of each product.

“WhatsApp being such an interactive channel, it allows us to ask a lot of questions and get the answers,” says Khurana.

The company also leverages technology to process all the data of the workers. It also engages with artificial intelligence (AI) to process the interaction information which goes through its WhatsApp channel.

“We interact and enable access to one lakh workers each month,” claims Khurana.

Today, Entitled Solutions has processed around Rs 100 crore in loans, and claims the default rate is below two percent. In the case of health needs, the startup provides information on the various government schemes.

The average loan ticket size without collaterals which is processed through the platform of Entitled Solutions is in the range of Rs 18,000-20,000 and can go up to a maximum of Rs 50,000.

The market

Entitled Solutions follows a B2B2C model where it partners enterprises that employ large numbers of blue-collar workers across sectors like delivery, facility management, security, and other such services.

Once onboarded, these workers gain access to a wide range of customised financial and healthcare products via the platform. The startup has tied up with banks and NBFCs, making their offerings available to users on the platform.

The company is currently reporting a monthly transaction value of around Rs 1 crore and claims it has a 4-5x increase in product usage. The overall business growth has been 2-2.5x over the last five years. Khurana claims the company has reached operational break-even on a month-on-month basis and is on the path towards profitability.

The startup primarily generates revenue through commissions on every successful closure of financial or healthcare products facilitated through its platform. It also generates revenue through various corporate social responsibility (CSR) programmes offered to enterprises.

Entitled Solutions has raised around Rs 4 crore in seed funding from HDFC Bank, SIS, LetsVenture, and angel investors. There are other entities which offer financial products to low-income workers which include banks, NBFCs, and startups like Shubh Finance, Nira.

SIS Limited CEO Dhiraj Singh said, “Through this partnership with Entitled, we aim to ensure that our staff have access to new age financial and health services support.”

“At same time, it helps in attraction and retention of good quality staff thereby ensuring the long-term success of our organization,” he added.

As part of its future plans, Entitled Solutions plans to broaden its portfolio of financial products by providing loans tailored for use cases like education, housing, and consumption. “We are also enabling our technology in such a way that others who are building similar products can use our platform to access these workers,” says Khurana.

The goal is to reach 10 million users by 2026 from the current level of one million.

“We are building a comprehensive ecosystem and will push our technology to enable further inclusion going forward,” says Khurana.