Rural Fintech Navadhan Forays Into 4-New States

Mumbai (Maharashtra) [India], August 26: Navadhan is emerging as a unique Rural fintech platform focussed at under-banked MSMEs. In 2021, Navadhan launched its operations in Central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh where it has enrolled over 2 lakh rural-small-businesses (MSMEs) so far. Based on the success of the model, it has now announced its expansion in all 4 directions with foray into states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka and Odisha.

Navadhan’s lending model is being scaled-up with its collection efficiency attracting over 25 lenders on the platform – including MSME focussed NBFCs like Vivriti, UGro. It enjoys credit lines of over Rs 1,000cr across a mix of On-lending and Co-lending. The rising demand of Priority Sector Loans (PSL) for Banks is another tailwind for its growth besides its geographical diversification into new states.

Navadhan has so far raised USD 7mn from Prime Venture Partners, Varanium NexGen Fintech Fund, Anicut Capital, BOPA Asia and Gemba Capital. This funding has helped in building the Tech platform and in expanding geographical footprint.

Founded by industry veteran Nitin Agrawal, along with co-founders Vijay Haswani, Anirudh Ramakuru and Amit Biswal. This seasoned founding team comes with extensive experience in building large scale profitable business. “We have curated a proprietary underwriting model on our AceN tech platform. We have been de-risking traditionally inhibiting factors like agri-risk, entrepreneur-risk, limited banking records, limited income proofs. This ingenious approach leverages digital footprints and cashflow surrogates to assess Small Business and proprietor Household as an integrated unit,” said Nitin Agrawal, Founder CEO of Navadhan.

Navadhan is building AceN tech platform, with fit-for-purpose Tech solutions addressing the challenges of serving the rural small businesses (MSMEs). It encapsulates the diversity of various regional nuances in India down to PIN code level. Traditional under-writing models apply one-size-fits all approach, instead, Navadhan’s AceN tech platform uses hyper-local indicators to customise credit-underwriting to higher precision.

Nitin Agrawal also underlined, “We are leveraging technology to building credit-tools and predictive analytics backed by data sciences. The power of Navadhan’s AceN tech platform lies not only in its API integration with lenders, but also in its seamless, paperless digital journey. With both technology and people on-ground, we generate priority sector assets. This is enabling financing in underserved markets. Our sharp focus on rural small businesses has helped us build a massively scalable model to leverage on a large and fast-growing market.”

While most of the fintech lending focusses on the top-20% of the market which is digitally included and banked, Navadhan is targeting the rest of the 80% informal market. This space holds larger potential, especially with Rural India growing faster than Urban India. Over the last 18 years, the average monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) for rural households, has grown by 11.1% annualised rate, which is faster than Urban India as per Govt. of India’s NSSO 78th round release. Further, Internet users in Rural areas has grown by 22% annually between 2017 to 2023 compared to 7% growth in Urban – mainly because of the base effect. Now, Rural has more Internet Users than Urban India (442mn over 378mn) as per IAMAI-Kantar 2023 report. Navadhan is harnessing this opportunity and participating in “new-wealth” creation emerging from Rural growth – and hence, deriving its name Navadhan.