Rohit Arora, CEO, Biz2Credit: Our Smart Business Lending Platform is Transforming the Fintech Landscape Globally

How does Biz2Credit’s business model help Indian SMBs?

Biz2Credit offers a fulfilment platform for small business lending that connects borrowers and lenders on a single platform. This is a simple concept, but it’s revolutionary. Every aspect of the process is tightly integrated into every other part. It makes it possible to have a simple, quick and fun (if we do say so ourselves) user experience while still reducing the risk for lenders who use our software. And it means that pricing can be refined so that clients are always getting the best deal possible - not a padded rate that could leave them scrambling to cover their payments.

In India, we work with our major banking and brokerage partners to deliver this platform to their clients in a fully branded experience just for them. This helps our clients extend credit to more SME customers with even greater efficiency and risk management than ever before.

What has been the response of the Indian market towards your offerings?

The Indian market had (and to an extent, continues to have) several gaps when it comes to access to credit for SMEs. Lack of awareness by consumers is always the first gap - so many entrepreneurs still don’t know about the opportunity to secure financing for their business dreams. The slow-paced movement to cloud from legacy banking systems and related obstacles being faced by banks in the adoption of digital technology were some challenges that we saw as opportunities.

Biz2Credit was launched with a vision to fill in these gaps in the market and to provide an end-to-end online lending service that works all over the world. The response has been excellent, and many of our Indian-based clients are now exceeding their demand targets and overall goals for total funded amounts.

Who are your prime customers?

Our immediate clients are the banks, financial institutions and brokerage firms that are trying to provide financing for small and mid-sized companies across India. We look at them as our primary clients in the market and we are constantly supporting them with technology innovations and new capabilities. However, we also look at their end-clients as being our customers in a meaningful way, as well. We spend a lot of money ensuring that the user experience (UX) for those small business owners is excellent all the way through.

What is the market potential of your services for the Indian SMBs?

Small businesses are the foundation of thriving economies - and those small businesses need working capital to keep the lights on and the wheel turning. In India alone, the SMB market produces close to 40% of GDP. That’s a massive contributor to the economy, and we expect that number to remain strong for years ahead. With 30 million SMEs in India, policymakers are paying attention to the market and doing everything they can to open up access to financing for so many of those businesses. We are perfectly positioned to be right in the middle of that growth for the long-run.

How do you intend to scale-up the Indian business?

We continue to grow the business in India through organic methods. It’s amazing how success breeds success - when you provide a critical service to an industry as large as financial services in India many of your new clients come to you based on your reputation as a great service provider. We’ve certainly seen the impact of this in our own business.

It also goes without saying that our data ecosystem has made scaling up in India much easier for us as a company. Our whole strategy is built around one single platform that can flexibly serve many different markets. That means we take always start our product development process by investigating the customer’s need and whether it can be replicated across different countries and scenarios.

We call this our global core strategy. But the way we have been so adaptable across markets is all down to our technical expertise at building towards the local ecosystem. Business owners in the US use Intuit Quickbooks or an accounting firm, but in India, there’s a whole other set of solutions that small businesses are used to.

That’s why we’ve built a differentiated API structure so that we can be flexible to fit within the norms of each market. We’re directly integrated into Tally Solutions which allows us to pull in Indian businesses’ GST data and other critical accounting information.  This is what we call our local ecosystem strategy.

What is your projected revenue figures for India?

We don’t discuss financial performance at a micro-level. However, suffice to say that we are very profitable and our revenue in India is growing equally fast to our global revenue.

How are your Indian partners leveraging the Biz2Credit platform to better serve the SME segment?

Our large financial clients are all using our Platform to provide access to capital to their small business clients in a more efficient, more effective manner. Our system allows them to provide automated funding decisions to their clients, which streamlines the process and saves them time. It also means that with less paperwork and less hassle, the banks can offer better pricing to their clients. And of course, we are security compliant at the highest levels (SOC-2, ISO 27001) which means business owners can feel confident that their personal information is always safe.

What are the latest happenings in terms of customer acquisition or new services?

We are launching new partnerships in India almost every month. We have just recently announced our work with Tata Capital, Andromeda and of course our data alliance with Tally Solutions. But there are still more announcements which are coming up that will be just as exciting. You’ll have to stay tuned to learn more!

As far as new services are concerned, our development team is always charging ahead with brand new capabilities that we’re adding to the platform. We recently announced our partnership in the US with Paychex (a major payroll and payments service provider) which included one of our newest innovations, the BizAnalyzer Virtual CFO. This totally free platform helps business owners benchmark their businesses against similar companies and analyze the health of their business’s finances.

Written By: Divya Bishi