Xiaomi launches Mi Credit lending solution in India

Chinese smartphone major Xiaomi on Tuesday formally launched its lending solution, Mi Credit, in the Indian market.

This is Xiaomi's second finance solution to be launched in India after Mi Pay.

"Mi Credit is an online curated marketplace for lending to offer the best personal loans... People can get up to Rs 1 lakh of loan and the process takes minimal time," Manu Jain, Vice President, Xiaomi and Managing Director, Xiaomi India told reporters here.

He added that the opportunity in online credit lending in India is estimated to touch Rs 70 lakh crore by 2023.

Citing a CIBIL report, Xiaomi said there are over Rs 4 lakh crores worth of personal loans outstanding from nearly 1.9 crore customers, with each user accounting to an almost Rs 2 lakh of outstanding amount.

Of these 1.9 crore customers, majority tend to avail it for medical emergencies followed by shopping, wedding, travel and education purposes.

The current lending partners for Mi Credit are primarily NBFCs or Fintechs such as Aditya Birla Finance Ltd, Money View, EarlySalary, Zestmoney and CreditVidya.

"It's built as the first personal loan choice for aspirational young professionals and millennials. Mi Credit solves most challenges associated with the traditional lending industry with a 100 per cent digital experience," Jain said.

Mi phone users can also check their credit score on the app for free.

"All user data on Mi Credit is stored securely in encrypted format in India through our partner Amazon Web Services Cloud Infrastructure," he said.

Mi Credit has been running in India in a pilot format, and has already disbursed loans of over Rs 28 crore in November this year.

Over 20 per cent of its users availed the highest amount of loan of Rs 1 lakh.

Currently, Mi Credit services more than 10 states spanning across 1,500 pin codes, and aims to expand its availability to 100 per cent of the pin codes by the end of FY2019, Jain said.

Mi Credit app will come pre-loaded on all MIUI phones, and can be downloaded from Google Play Store and GetApps, Xiaomi's own app store.

Mi Pay is a UPI based payment app available on all MIUI phones, and can be downloaded from GetApps and Google Play Store. It was launched in India in March 2018, and within nine months has already captured over 20 million registered users.

Hong Feng, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President, Xiaomi Corporation and Chairman and CEO, Xiaomi Finance said the company's Mi Finance business started four years ago in China.

"Today, we have over 300 million Mi Fans in our global community and having understood their consumption behaviour - it is one of the strengths we aim to leverage to build a stronger Mi Finance business globally," he added.