Aye Finance leads to growth of 18,000 Indian MSMEs

Innovative finance company providing business loans to small and micro enterprises across India Aye Finance on Monday announced disbursal of Rs. 200 crore in loans to 18,000 micro and small enterprises in India, since its inception in 2014.

Aye Finance has achieved this milestone by investing substantial efforts in devising technically enabled processes to build credit insights through a variety of available business and behavioral data.

This effective credit appraisal coupled with the use of modern workflow automation, and a small but engaged workforce is helping Aye bridge the gap between MSMEs and organized lending.

Aye Finance was founded by bankers Sanjay Sharma and Vikram Jaitley with an aim to transform micro and small enterprise financing in India. Aye continues to chart an exciting growth path in this under banked segment while maintaining a high benchmark for credit quality.

It is equity-funded by three reputed funders - global nonprofit and financial inclusion pioneer Accion, SAIF Partners and LGT Impact ventures. It also has over a dozen debt providers, including India's largest PSU Bank, SBI.

Headquartered in Gurgaon, Aye has 38 branches and a team size of almost 600 employees. As a Non-Banking Financial Company, Aye Finance is proud to make business loans against mortgage or simple hypothecation accessible to India's thriving and underserved MSME sector.

"Providing support to a micro scale business at the bottom of the pyramid is a qualitatively superior channel of creating social uplift, and when micro enterprises progress, they have a multiplier effect - creating jobs, improving education of children, better health and safety awareness, and better nutrition, etc. We at Aye are passionate about solving the challenges of funding MSMEs and enabling their inclusion into the mainstream of the economy," said Managing Director and co-founder of Aye Finance, Sanjay Sharma.

"Year 2017 will be a pivotal year for Aye and we have a bold expansion plan of growing our loan book to Rs. 400 crore plus. This will be actualized through the additional 40 branches we will open during the year and by leveraging advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to optimize credit risk analysis with the help of Accion's Global Advisory Solutions (GLAS) team," added Sanjay.

"Aye Finance's impact on 18,000 businesses, and the company's strong growth trajectory, are the result of the company's innovative approach to providing capital to underserved small businesses. Its industry cluster-based credit appraisal process uniquely enables them to extend working capital loans to creditworthy applicants. The company's management team is also doing phenomenal in mentoring small businesses and providing counsel around best market practices," said vice president, GLAS - Digital Solutions, Accion, Prateek Shrivastava.

Aye is setting new standards in building a quality loans portfolio in an inclusive manner and is well on its way of achieving its vision of being the most admired and one of the top three companies in the micro and small business lending space in the next five years.