KreditBee, the Indian FinTech Startup, got registered as Finnovation Tech Solutions Pvt Ltd and began its journey in 2018. With the vision of ensuring the underserved population of young professionals and non-salaried gig workers, including part-timers, freelancers, and self-employed, sleep with the fulfillment of a dream in their eyes.
In the last three years, amidst the pandemic, the FinTech platform has disbursed over $2 billion worth of loans. With the desire to become the first choice when it comes to quick and convenient personal loans.
KreditBee has gained recognition as a one-stop solution for digital lending in the Indian ecosystem, particularly among those who are new to credit.
To provide 360-degree financial inclusion, the KreditBee Card was launched in August 2021 and has emerged as the fastest card to cross the milestone of issuing 1 million cards and has a goal of achieving the issuing of 10 million cards by mid-2023.
KreditBee: Behind the Scenes
In 2018, with a mission to democratise credit, the founders, hailing from prestigious educational institutions such as the National University of Singapore, IIM Bangalore, IIM Indore, and NITK Surathkal, started the company with the simple idea of making short-term loans available to young working professionals for meeting urgent and unexpected financial needs.
Back in 2016, when its IT team was managing manually, it worked upon its strategies to achieve monthly disbursements of 10 million from 40,000 loans in the next four years.
It needed to shift its focus to innovation while minimizing operational overhead, and from 2018 to 2020, the number of loans disbursed each month by KreditBee increased by 25 times, totaling just over 1 million loans per month as of mid-2020.
About the Founders:
Madhusudan Ekambaram is the CEO & Co-founder of KreditBee. Before starting up KreditBee, he was business head, leading the eCommerce practice across geographies, including MY, SG, ID, RU, and MX countries. In the early part of his career, he focused on product portfolio management in the telecom sector.
K. Karthikeyan started his career as the Technical Lead for Innova Systems. The three-time entrepreneur co-founded NTT Solutions and KrazyBee before KreditBee, where he has undertaken the responsibilities as the CTO of KreditBee.
Vivek Veda started his career as an analyst and later began working on KrazyBee, along with his co-founders, in March 2016 before taking on the responsibilities as CFO at Kreditbee.
KreditBee: Bridging the Gap
The idea behind KreditBee was to serve the underserved population, who are relatively new to the credit segment and are not served by the traditional financial institutions. This credit gap was addressed by KreditBee by leveraging an enhanced technology architecture.
The underserved population was deprived of financial support by the traditional financial setups (including banks and NBFCs) due to their inability to appropriately understand the credit needs and the repayment capabilities of the former.
It is at this juncture that FinTech aims to help young professionals and students gain access to microloans and pay for different expenses.
Customers can get loans directly from their smartphones into their bank accounts at any time, without the need for paperwork or branch visits, thanks to the full-stack digital lending platform.
From initial application to disbursement of funds in customers’ bank accounts, the entire process is summed up in under 15 minutes, compared to the weeks that might be the regular norm with other financial institutions.
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KreditBee – Revenue Model
In the words of Co-Founder & CFO Karthikeyan K – KreditBee’s business model built on its robust technology stack is its key differentiator.
KreditBee combines technological expertise, a powerful underwriting model, and a digitised overall loan process across a variety of specialised products. This enables KreditBee to effectively serve the diverse financing needs of its customers, which include first-time credit applicants.
The revenue model of KreditBee is based on standard digital lending, and thus the interest income from the users serves as a profitability metric on the unit economic sheet. While working with various channel partners, KreditBee also generates income, which it passes on to the end-users.
KreditBee – Company Funding
The company has a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform to provide Application Programming Interface (API) services to multiple FinTech companies and brands.
From the sources of the Economic Times, it is learned that the company has raised INR 60 crore (about $8 million) in equity and debt from SIDBI’s investment arm, India SME Investments.
The FinTech lender said– The funding is part of its Series C round, in which the startup earlier raised about $145 million from the likes of Premji Invest, Mirae Asset Ventures, and TPG-backed NewQuest Capital Partners, and Motilal Oswal Private Equity.
The company is looking to expand its lending portfolio by introducing financial services like BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) and insurance, among others.
KreditBee – The Roadmap Ahead
Since 2018, the customer base at KreditBee has grown by many folds and increased to more than 30 million, which includes more than five million credit customers. The company acquired more than 75% of these card customers from metros and Tier-1 cities.
The company aims to issue over 250,000 cards every month. The new products in the block are KreditBee Card, KreditBee Pay (BNPL), Loan-Linked Micro-Insurance, and Credit Score Report ideas, which the company showcases in its portfolio.
As per the company’s diversification plan, it also plans to get involved in venturing into digitally-enabled secured loans, home loans, and credit lines. With this, the company intends to consolidate and saturate the market with the existing lending portfolio with the idea of full-stack digital lending.
Curtain Call
With its remarkable growth, Indian FinTech has helped millions of small businesses in India grow and succeed. With its diversified products and future vision, it will, without any spec of doubt, be a provider of a holistic set of financial services tilted towards lending.
So now you can dream big!
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