Credit is the lifeline of any business or economy, and more often than not, a vast majority of people are seemingly unqualified to receive this money. In an attempt to help small business owners or individual businesses avail credit, MudraCircle was started by Vaibhav Mishra, Anand Mishra, and Amit Kumar in 2018 in Mumbai. Vaibhav says, Studies have shown that 92 percent of SMEs or self-employed business are unfunded in India. This means they generally cannot avail credit either from a bank or NBFC.

MudraCircle is looking to change this through a combination of technology, banking experience, and an understanding of business dynamics. This fintech startup brings together borrowers and lenders onto a single platform. Over the last one year, it claims to have enabled the disbursal of around Rs 10 crore of loans.

Vaibhav has been into banking for nearly two decades now, while Anand and Amit are technologists. With his experience in different functions in the banking sector, Vaibhav says he came across many people who just could not avail of credit as the parameters set by the bank did not fit their profile. This was also compounded by the fact that banks or NBFCs were regulated bodies so they could not create any alternative lending models. Vaibhav says, There was this large pool of people, which was unfunded though there was cash in the system and there was a lot of digital activity happening.

This gave the founders a sense of opportunity, which led them to start their bootstrapped venture. We decided to integrate all this data with the digital process and create an alternative scoring model, which is robust as well as flexible, he adds.

This is a team of 4 Co-founders which has banking/ finance, Technology and Data-science expertise between them. MudraCircle is all set for a big bang commercial launch in January 2018.

Vaibhav told us that India has over 50mn+ registered enterprises of which about 92% do not have access to adequate credit. The total MSME funding gap across the sector is about INR3Tn. Unit economics (in branch and spoke model) does not favor traditional institution penetration in this segment. Lack of distributor/ trade credit facilities further widens the demand for our services. One of the other main reasons is absence of reliable credit methodology to assess these unfunded or underfunded customers. We feel getting finance should be quick and easy, so that the enterpreneur can get back to doing what he/ she do best- running their businesses. Whole system cuts out the complexity and hassle of borrowing.

If enterprenur has gone wrong somewhere with his/ her credit score we help them in identifying the problem and suggest ways to improve the same. With our understanding we also help borrowers to improve credit score by way of financial/ credit literacy education. This credit consultancy will be free for its borrowers.

MudraCircle  aims to connect with existing DSAs in the country for getting borrowers on board as a separate acquisition channel apart from Digital marketing leads. Partners would have their own dashboards from which they can upload borrower files. For existing DSAs, complete digital process would result in better productivity & earnings. At Mudra Circle, we're open to partner with a broad range of businesses, corporates, institutions, from brokers to advisors and affiliates to retailers and banks to NBFCs. People whom we work with should share our goal of delivering fast & best-in-class customer experience in financial services by making money simple and fair.