Swiggy partners with Indifi Technologies to provide loans to restaurants

Online food ordering and delivery service Swiggy has partnered with Indifi Technologies to launch Swiggy Capital Assist, a programme to provide unsecured loans to restaurants listed on the platform.

The programme will look to provide restaurant partners with working capital loans that will be processed in under 24 hours and disbursed within a week. Swiggy said the loans will help partners expand their business both through it as well as offline.

"Through Swiggy Capital Assist, we want to leverage our credibility to provide fair and hassle-free financing options to our restaurant partners, much like our seamless delivery service," said Sriharsha Majety, CEO of Swiggy, in a statement.

Indifi Technologies will offer collateral-free loans without any initial deposit and at fair interest rates. The move is similar to what large e-commerce players did for their vendors, by arranging quick working capital loans based on the financial data of partners that the online platforms had collected.

In turn, they were able to tap these sellers for additional business driven through their online platforms. For Swiggy, which is continually looking at entering new locations on the back of partnering with restaurants, is looking at ways to get them to expand their service for it to serve more customers.

Swiggy's pilot offering to restaurants that was kicked off in mid-September saw the company receiving over 200 loan applications from across eight cities.

"Indifi's partnership with Swiggy creates a seamless financing platform for restaurant owners, as well as the data infrastructure to enable strong credit quality for lenders," said Siddharth Mahanot, COO, Indifi.

Swiggy is also working with select restaurants to share data and help them expand into new locations, using data to suggest where they could find maximum business. The Swiggy Capital Assist will go a step further to offer restaurants capital in order to expand their businesses, helping the online platform serve more customers.