Four fintech companies helping MSMEs access easy, collateral-free loans

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) sector, despite providing crucial support to India’s economy, suffers from credit crunch. This is especially the concern for companies seeking collateral-free loans, which are unsecured debt given by banking or finance institutions. 

According to Ram Kewalramani, Co-Founder and Managing Director of CredAble, the MSME segment contributes 40 percent to total exports in India, but it often finds itself in dire straits as far as financing operations is concerned as only 16 percent have access to formal credit.

Several fintech companies are solving this problem by created lending platforms, which offer small-scale entrepreneurs easy and collateral free loans of up to Rs one crore, helping them scale business. 

Kinara Capital

Bengaluru-based Kinara Capital is a digital platform and helps to eliminate paperwork and save time for both customers and employees to fast-track the credit decision process.

Founded by Hardika Shah, Kinara Capital says it provides fast and flexible loans of Rs 2-25 lakh without taking collateral from small business entrepreneurs. The company claims to have disbursed Rs 2,000 crore so far across 56,000+ collateral-free small business loans with a presence in more than 90 cities across India. 

Last year in November, Kinara Capital had also launched myKinara mobile app to provide collateral-free loans to MSMEs within 24 hours. The app comes with a simple three-step process — a first-of-its-kind in the unsecured MSME business lending space. 

Lendingkart

Lendingkart Finance Limited is a non-deposit taking NBFC providing working capital loans and business loans to SMEs across India. 

Started by Harshvardhan Lunia who is the co-founder and Managing Director of the company, the NBFC provides collateral-free short term working capital loans to MSMEs with minimal paperwork within 72 hours. The loan ticket sizes range from as low as Rs 50,000 up to 1 crore for a period of 1 to 36 months.

Lendingkart has offices in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi NCR and has service reach across India. Since its inception, Lendingkart Finance has evaluated nearly half a million applications, disbursing 1,00,000+ loans to more than 90,000+ MSMEs in 1300+ cities across all 29 states and union territories of India, making it the non-banking financial institution (NBFC) with the largest geographical footprint in the country. 

Indifi

Gurugram-based Indifi is a lending startup focused on the MSME segment that was started by Alok Mittal in 2015. 

Since inception, the lending startup has disbursed more than 37,000 loans across 12 industries, actively leveraging its extensive network of over 20 lenders, including its in-house NFBC Riviera, and more than 80 partners where 15 percent of the loan disbursals are to Tier 3 and 4 cities

The startup offers loan up to Rs 50 lakh as collateral-free. Last year, Facebook India launched a ‘Small Business Loans Initiative’ programme, where it partnered with Indifi to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) avail of easy, collateral-free loans. 

Flexiloans

Mumbai-based SME fintech company FlexiLoans aims to provide fast and affordable credit to SMBs in India with a branchless, agent-less, paperless business model. 

Started by Abhishek Kothari, Deepak Jain, Manish Lunia, and Ritesh Jain in 2015, Flexiloans processes over Rs 2,000 crore worth loans. The platform offers collateral-free loans to small and medium businesses.

In 2021, Flexiloans became one of the first lenders to go live on the Google Pay platform  to offer loans to their merchant base.