Askme Fin plans to expand product porfolio

Currently offers working capital loans to SMEs including short-term funds, overdraft, loans against receivables and bill discounting facility

Askme Fin plans to expand its service portfolio. Apart from lending, the company wants to offer financial services like asset management and insurance to small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The company currently offers working capital loans to small and medium enterprises , including short-term funds, overdraft, loans against receivables and bill discounting facility.

The group has nearly 15 million online and offline listed SMEs with it.

An aggregator providing funds to SME suppliers, Askme Fin is part of the e-commerce player Askme Group. “Currently, we are offering funds to our supplier SMEs. Now we are planning to provide other financial services including mutual funds and insurance. The company is assessing legal aspects of offering these services. We aim to provide these serices to SMEs by end of the second quarter of financial year 2016-17,” said Pawan Lohia, chief executive officer of Askme Fin.

The company has already tied up with non-bank finance companies (NBFC), banks and online lending partners, including Bajaj Finserv, Mahindra Finance, Religare, Capital Float, SMEBank.in, Mandii.com and ICICI Bank to provide funds for working capital.

“We have had talks with banks and NBFCs for providing other financial service and they have seconded the idea. We are also planning to join hands with other NBFCs which have strong presence at the regional level,” Lohia added.

The group has also come up with a series of strategic alliances to facilitate faster financing for SMEs and offering loans ranging from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 crore to its sellers, available for tenure ranging from 15 days to 6 months. The financing options will be in addition to its array of services that serve SMEs from AskMe, AskmeBazaar, AskmePay, AskmeFurniture and AskmeGrocery.

The group is aiming to provide fund assistance of Rs 1,000 crore to over 10,000 SMEs by end of March 2017. Since its launch from March this year, Askme Fin has provided loans worth Rs 30 crore to about 100 SMEs.