Aye Finance disburses 60,000 loans to MSMEs

Aye Finance has emerged as a leading MSME lender in India. Incepted in the year 2014 with a vision to leverage technology in resolving the challenges encountered by MSMEs in accessing business funding, the Gurgaon-headquartered FinTech lender has disbursed 60,000 loans till date, enabling the growth and development of the crucial sector.

"I strongly believe that if India has to rise with a social balance, the micro businesses at the bottom of the pyramid have to be enabled and empowered. I co-founded Aye Finance with Vikram Jetley to accomplish this by transforming micro and small scale enterprise financing in India. On April 2014, the company gave its first business loan to a micro enterprise at its Karampura branch in West Delhi. Having disbursed 60,000 loans amounting to over Rs. 700 crores since then, Aye is now poised as a leader in the space of MSME lending," said MD and co-founder of Aye Finance, Sanjay Sharma.

To best address the risk appetite and payback credentials of these enterprises that lack proper business documentation and credit histories, Aye Finance adopted a unique "Cluster Based Credit Assessment" methodology. Understanding different industry clusters helped Aye Finance gain significant insights into the cash-flows and seasonal fluctuations of these enterprises.

Aye services over 50 industry clusters in India through its 73 Branches, including sports goods manufacturing, hosiery, gota work, marble inlay work, dairy farming, jutti (foot-wear) manufacturing, amongst others. And by using crowd CRM and teaching its borrowers to use non cash modes of repayment, Aye has been able to reduce the costs of origination and servicing of loans.

Aye is equity funded by three reputed investors- Accion, SAIF Partners and LGT. It has over a dozen debt partners including India's largest PSU Bank SBI; and leading global impact investors like BlueOrchard Finance Ltd, Triodos Investment Management and Symbiotics.