'Lending To Get Seamless For Small And Medium Enterprises'

In the medium to long term, lending would be an easy affair. This was what was something which was agreed unanimously at the BW Businessworld Growth Leadership Conclave and Awards 2018: From SMEs to Unicorns, there was a panel discussion on "Finance Made easy" which was moderated by Mahua Venkatesh, Associate Editor, BW Businessworld.

Alok Mittal, CEO and Co-Founder, Indifi Technologies said, "Today there are several categories for lenders and some of them of them are more towards SME lending. In the overall scenario, SME is being viewed as one of the attractive segments as far as growth in categories is concerned.  The big corporate lending is not growing as fast as there is a huge emphasis on small business loans.  Apart from the PSBs, many of the midsize private banks are getting fairly aggressive on the MSMEs. NBFC of course has been addressing this market for a long time. Over the last couple of years, there are also digital lending platforms that have come up such as our own, which will understand the needs of the MSMEs. There is a general intent to put in place more incentives and are also process enablers. China's SMEs, which got a huge thrust from the govt way back in 2015, now accounts for 60% of the GDP.  Likewise, SMEs will be a major contributor to India's GDP going forward."

Sanjay Sharma, MD and Co-founder, Aye Finance said, "These (small) enterprise owners do not have proper books of accounts.  They have never taken loans from banks and don't have proper credit history. That is a big challenge that we are trying to solve.  The case has been that after four years, there are around 50,000 such enterprises. Their portfolios are also stable. Their losses are much lower than many types of MSEs."

Raju Moza, CFO, Zentrix said, "From the GST perspective, there have been some irritants in terms of implementation, design, coding etc which every SME was involved with.  I strongly believe that is the only way out and we have to accommodate these minor irritants which we have faced.  From the funding perspective, MSME segment has not gained much traction. This sector needs 5 billion dollar of debt for captive funding."

Avishek Banerjee

BW Reporters The author is a Principal Correspondent at BW Businessworld.