Recession-Proof Business

The NBFCs and banks have grappled with many issues in recent times due to rising cases of nonpayment. Moreover, the per capita debt also did not increase beyond a limit in India. Bhavin Patel decided to resolve issues revolving around credit availability and saw the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending model as a solution. His venture LenDenClub works on this model to amass idle capital from individuals and give credit to needy people.

LenDenClub allows individuals to maximise their investment returns by investing the funds in borrowers. With consistently enabling its lenders to earn high returns of between 10 per cent and 12 per cent over the last six years, it has become a strong community of 4 million users. 

“In 2020, when most lending companies stopped lending to their customers during the first countrywide lockdown, we were still disbursing the loans at a regular interest rate and kept registering huge growth month over month. We grew almost ten times during that financial year against the overall unsecured loan market growing negative. That shows the strength of our recession-proof business model,” says Patel.

Healthy Loan disbursal

It has so far disbursed more than Rs 2,500 crore worth of loans to nearly 5 lakh individuals helping them reach their financial goals. LenDenClub has raised close to Rs 90 crore across three funding rounds, the most recent being a Series A round of Rs 75 crore. It presently offers three products, two for borrowers and one for lenders backed by powerful AI-based algorithms. 

Patel says the emphasis is on leveraging technology while adapting creatively to an ever-evolving financial services marketplace. “We believe that we are a technology product company and should be called ‘TechFin’ as we have constantly been inventing products for lenders as well as borrowers on our platform.” 

LenDenClub is now building products for the next phase of growth. It is adding three loan investment products for its investors. It is innovating and upgrading the proprietary tech-stack platform to aid and upkeep the growth in the customer base while supporting all kinds of banking operations conducted on its platform.