New Delhi, December 23, 2019: In a statement that would give a ray of hope to the cash-strapped ‘micro’ segment of India, ML-based microlender HAPPY recently announced crossing the 300,000-loan-mark. The tech-driven lender has achieved this figure while maintaining a repeat borrower rate of 70%, thereby channelizing a total of Rs. 200 crore towards the micro-segment.
HAPPY provides low ticket unsecured loans to underserved micro-entrepreneurs through a complete digital journey. Over 50% of HAPPY’s customers are new to credit (NTC). The issued loans belongs to diverse categories such as payments, agriculture, affordable housing, e-retail, invoice discounting, dairy, and many more. HAPPY had disbursed its first loan back in February 2017 and has considerably expanded its technological expertise ever since, which has enabled it to underwrite loans for different segments and use cases despite the sheer unavailability of data in the MSME sector. The high percentage of repeat borrowers depicts superior proclivity of people to avail loans from HAPPY after using its services once.
Manish Khera, Founder & CEO, HAPPY said, “We have travelled a long way in terms of our market journey and expanded our business footprint across more than 500 locations in India. The Team HAPPY has always been a strong believer of quality, as reflected in our low loss ratio, despite no collections team. This is while operating in the high-risk MSME domain and being centered on a partnership-based business model. The credit model has also evolved brilliantly over the years and is today leveraging ML to extend loans in less than a minute to our customers. We strongly believe that HAPPY will emerge as a game-changer in the MSME credit scenario and empower more businesses to grow seamlessly.”
The data-driven lender extends loans to its customers via these players in less than a minute. The platform assesses them from different types data (like transaction data, sales data, invoice data, to name a few) after running it through its ML-based proprietary algorithm. To date, HAPPY has developed more than 20 cohorts and continues to do so with its tech-led approach, thereby helping more micro businesses to meet their credit requirements in India through the formal lending channel.
HAPPY proposed to grow to a million loans and Rs 1,000 crores of disbursements in a short time.
