Navi will simplify financial services, improve affordability: Sachin Bansal

Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal on Thursday said he aims to simplify and improve accessibility and affordability of financial services for a billion users with his fintech venture, Navi.

"Our mission is to be able to simplify financial services for a billion users and make it accessible and affordable...we believe that currently, financial services are not simple enough, are not affordable and are not accessible," he said at the Global Fintech Fest 2020.

Bansal added that the cost of operations is very high, which gets passed on to the customers.

He also said the middle-class Indian is still under-tapped and does not get good service from banks and other financial institutions.

After moving out of Flipkart, Bansal - along with Ankit Agarwal - founded Navi in 2018. Currently, Navi offers unsecured loans of up to Rs 5 lakh for a 12-24 month period and underwrites it digitally.

"Our focus has been on the middle income (group), those are underserved. The top-50 million or so users are well served by the banks and insurance companies and even NBFCs (non-banking financial companies) and other lenders," he said.

Bansal added that it is the next 100 million or so users who have the means to grab the attention of the big banks and insurance companies.

Talking about the microfinance sector, Bansal said that as more people digitally connected, microfinance will become more mainstream.

"As of now, we have a digital lending product out in the market...we have health insurance product out in the market and we have a motor insurance product, these two products are very early... And, of course, we have a microfinance company that is very large and we are looking to expand that as well," he added.

Bansal said the BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sector can attract a lot more start-ups and that can kick-start the innovation in this space.