New Delhi-based B2B marketplace TradeIndia has rolled out TradeIndia Lending (TI Lending), a new loan service for micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), according to a Financial Express report Friday (July 8).
CEO Sandip Chettri said TradeIndia was launching the product because the company discovered that many smaller businesses were concerned about raising credit.
The report noted that MSMEs in India have a big credit gap, with the reasons behind the lack of access to capital being an absence of collateral, incomplete books of accounts, a preference for using cash and a meager credit history.
“This made us introspect if we could be a one-stop solution for the SMEs, where we go beyond providing access to a marketplace by also supporting them in raising funds to meet their next big order,” Chettri said, per the report.
According to the report, the platform will initially screen for eligibility for loans, and will charge a processing fee for the loan screening and part of the interest from the debtor. Because of that, Chettri said businesses would see “more value” with TradeIndia.
TI Lending will have several products available in its first year, including working capital loans, supply chain financing loans and a subscription-based offering for smaller businesses that want to use the company’s products to add more digitization.
PYMNTS wrote in 2020 that TradeIndia had teamed with Cashfree, a payments and banking tech company from India, to offer online payments using cards, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and internet banking as part of its TradeKhata offering at the time.
See also: Cashfree, TradeIndia Partner For SMB Digitization
According to the report, this helped provide buyers and sellers around the world with a reliable way to identify and communicate with business owners.
The pandemic offered some setbacks, but at the time, Cashfree co-founder Reeju Datta said the move to a more digital world made it much more urgent for smaller businesses “to embrace digital payments at scale in order to grow their businesses.”
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