geo/india
Member CreditEnable launched the “We Move Forward” initiative designed to help SMEs keep their businesses safe during the COVID-19 crisis. Offering free financial health checks and access to working capital loans, CreditEnable plans to provide 600,000 SMEs with this free service over the next month.
Washington, D.C., September 23rd, 2019 – Infini became the newest member of the SME Finance Forum, a global membership network that brings together financial institutions, technology companies, and development finance institutions to share knowledge, spur innovation, and promote the growth of SMEs.
With the growing recognition of women entrepreneurs’ contribution to economic growth, there is need to understand the state of their operations in India. This report, by the IFC, aims to assess the financing gap through a hybrid approach, including both secondary estimation and primary data collection, and identify the key characteristics of women-owned businesses (MSMEs), their need for financial and non-financial services, their uptake of financial products and the barriers to their access.
As PayPal reaches saturation points in Western markets, it wants to continue to expand internationally, especially in India, where the country’s 450 million mobile users make it an attractive target for retailers.
The Financial Times is reporting that PayPal launched a domestic business in India in 2017, which allows for local and global payments in the country. PayPal considers the country critical to its growth.
News via Pymnts.com
Medici examines the widening financial gap in India and their lack of push for institutional credit for consumers. With consumer debt to GDP at only 17 percent, India falls behind major economies of Asia Pacific.
According to the article, “In the absence of institutional credit at fair interest rates for a majority of the population, people at the bottom of the pyramid are left devoid of opportunities and fail to be included in the financial system.”
Key contributing factors to this issue of financial inclusion include:
In two years, India’s story of financial inclusion has shifted from account opening to account usage. Supported by enabling technology and focused policy moves, India presents a clear example of how policy imperatives can drive the agenda of financial inclusion. 2017 was a positive shift from 2015. During this time, new models like payments banks have emerged, support systems have become better, use-cases have increased, while agent networks have strengthened to position themselves as delivery channels for various financial and non-financial
services.
The Economic Times review of the Economic Survey 2017-18 says that the amount of credit or loans disbursed by banks amounted to Rs 26,041 billion as on November 2017, but 82.6% of this was pocketed by large enterprises. For millions of SMEs in the country, banks only lent out 17.4 % of the total credit. Learn more about the survey and how MSME climate in India as well as analysis of the report and the pitch for peer to peer lending as a solution for India's MSMEs.
Mihasonirina Andrianaivo is a Senior Financial Sector Specialist working in Finance and Markets operations in the South Asia Region the World Bank. In this blog, she writes about programs announced in recent years that have fostered a more favorable business environment for fintech models to emerge in the MSME lending space – in India.
On a recent visit to Bangalore, India, CGAP worked with Janalakshmi Financial Services to deepen their understanding of microentrepreneurs through research and qualitative discussions. They found that the conventional measures used to assess larger businesses, such as formal credit history, the enterprise’s size and the number of years it has been in business, often incompletely assess the business acumen of microentrepreneurs.
IDFC Bank is among India’s first private-sector banks to pilot digital financial services that leverage the country’s new Aadhaar-enabled payment systems (AEPS), which makes digital money more accessible and practical for everyday transactions than ever before. Now, to do anything from receiving government payments to buying groceries, all a customer in Royyuru needs is a unique Aadhaar identity number and fingerprint to authenticate the transaction.
