Rural Fintech Navadhan Forays Into 4-New States

Navadhan's lending model is being scaled-up with its collection efficiency attracting over 25 lenders on the platform - including MSME-focused NBFCs like Vivriti, UGro. It enjoys credit lines of over Rs 1,000 crore across a mix of On-lending and Co-lending.

AceN tech platform

Navadhan is building AceN tech platform, with fit-for-purpose Tech solutions to address the challenges of serving 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 the ground, we generate priority sector assets. This is enabling financing in underserved markets.

Targeting informal market

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 per cent of the market, which is digitally included and banked, Navadhan is targeting the rest of the 80 per cent 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 per cent annualised rate, which is faster than urban India as per the Government of India's NSSO 78th round release.

Further, Internet users in Rural areas has grown by 22 per cent annually between 2017 and 2023, compared to 7 per cent growth in Urban areas, mainly because of the base effect.

Now, rural India has more Internet users than Urban India (442 million over 378 million), as per the IAMAI-Kantar 2023 report. Navadhan is harnessing this opportunity and participating in "new-wealth" creation emerging from Rural growth, hence its name, Navadhan