Sachin Bansal, a co-founder of
Flipkart, who has emerged as a major player in digital lending, is ready to shake up the
banking space.
Chaitanya India Fin Credit Pvt Ltd (CIFCPL), the microfinance arm of Bansal‘s Navi Technologies has applied for a banking licence. The lender has made an application to the RBI for a universal banking licence under the RBI’s On-Tap Banking Licence Guidelines, 2016.
Navi Technologies is also hiring top talent from tech and B-schools as digitalisation unfolds and was looking to ramp up hiring ten-fold in 2021, according to reports.
Navi Technologies
After moving out of Flipkart, Bansal, along with Ankit Agarwal, founded Navi in 2018 to build technology-driven businesses in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) space.
Navi offers unsecured loans of up to Rs 5 lakh for a 12-24 month period and underwrites them digitally.
Bansal has committed to deploy most of his capital resources coming from his earlier investments in Ola and Ather Energy into this venture. “I’m putting almost all of mine, that is going to happen in the next few days or weeks, whatever is left after Ola investment. All eggs in one basket,” Bansal had said.
He later invested about Rs 3,000 crore in Navi Technologies, alongside a few other investors.
Banking ambitions
With an eye on a banking licence, Bansal had roped in former ICICI Bank executive Nachiket Mor and Paresh Sukthankar. In earlier media interactions this year, Bansal had hinted at investing $400 million in banking foray. Along with Bansal, who has invested Rs 2,928 crore, others including former HDFC Bank deputy managing director Paresh Sukthankar and bankers from JP Morgan, Standard Chartered and Bank of Sharjah have also invested in the venture. In January 2020, Navi Technologies had announced the acquisition of DHFL General Insurance, now renamed Navi General Insurance and had bought up Essel Mutual Funds from Zee Group.
Bet on BFSI
Even before Covid, the e-commerce pioneer had expressed his strong commitment towards a digital form rather than traditional banking and believed that smartphones will be the centre of consumer experience for them.
“Our mission is to be able to simplify financial services for a billion users and make it accessible and affordable…we believe that currently, financial services are not simple enough, are not affordable and are not accessible,” he said
“Our focus has been on the middle income (group), those are underserved. The top-50 million or so users are well served by the banks and insurance companies and even NBFCs (non-banking financial companies) and other lenders,” he said.
Bansal had said it is the next 100 million or so users who have the means to the attention of the big banks and insurance companies.
Talking about the microfinance sector, Bansal had said as more people digitally connected, microfinance will become more mainstream.
“As of now, we have a digital lending product out in the market…we have health insurance product out in the market and we have a motor insurance product, these two products are very early… And, of course, we have a microfinance company that is very large and we are looking to expand that as well,” he added.
Currently, Navi has around 200 employees, including technology and non-technology personnel.