Tag: OkCredit

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Business

5 startups that are providing financial assistance to small businesses

Dec 9, 2021 by Gouri Achary 0 Comments #financial assistance to small businesses, #OkCredit, #Progcap, #ShopKirana, #StoreKing, #Sub-K

COVID-19 achieved the unthinkable: it expedited digitalization by more than a decade across sectors and industries. Due to restrictions and social distancing conventions, even small companies and kiranas have chosen to go digital. Accepting online payments, ordering supplies online, controlling inventories, and more were all part of the package.

All of it, though, came with its own set of difficulties. Despite a dynamic startup ecosystem in the country, sometimes finding funds and investors for small business entrepreneurs in the growth phase is still a challenge. Here are five organizations that are providing solutions and facilitating financial uplift for small businesses by providing low-interest loans and on-demand financing for working capital. They also offer expert guidance on how to invest money and timely bill payment alerts to help people maintain clean credit histories to qualify for larger loans.

StoreKing

StoreKing, a rural retail ecosystem that connects suppliers and financial institutions to rural consumers with Kirana as an anchor, also leverages the retail/kirana stores to cater to the rural masses, by connecting them with NBFC lenders, who are otherwise inaccessible to the village folks. StoreKing has already established a network of 25000 kirana stores, which will be utilized to connect rural folks to NBFC lenders. StoreKing has so far disbursed 120 crores worth of loans and has also had a remarkable collection percentage of more than 99.6%.

Progcap

Progcap (Desiderata Impact Ventures Private Limited) is a mission-driven, inclusive financing technology firm working to unlock the transformational impact of millions of micro and small enterprises in the last mile by providing them affordable, customized finance and digitizing their supply chains. Progcap uses a mix of technology and its unique delivery model to underwrite credit and thus provide the under-banked semi-urban and rural retailers in India access to flexible, collateral-free working capital.

Sub-K

Sub-K is a digital finance (Fintech) company that offers affordable, accessible, and scalable financial and payment services to rural/urban areas that have difficulty accessing the traditional financial models. They seek to bridge the digital divide, and create a ‘financially included’ society, through a robust and widespread retail distribution network and in-house Fintech solutions. Sub-K creates a high-tech-high-touch operating infrastructure at the last mile to deliver meaningful financial services through a capital-light model and a wide distribution network.

They also offer savings, credit, remittance, insurance, G2C, and B2C payments as a channel partner for formal financial institutions. Unlike single product FinTechs and exclusive digital platforms, Sub-K’s innovation lies in offering diversified financial services through digital solutions coupled with list mile connectivity. As a result, their services are cost-effective, customer-centric, highly accessible, and crafted according to the needs of the financially and digitally excluded population.

ShopKirana

ShopKirana is a B2B – commerce that started with a vision to empower millions of retailers which connects 1.2 Bn+ population of India in terms of trade. The company is focused on technology and supply chain innovation that aims to empower retailers to be competitive by providing technology, operational expertise, and scale advantage. Idea is to partner with millions of retailers (by becoming part of their supply chain) and making it the biggest and quickest go-to-market channel for products and services. ShopKirana directly works with brands to give them a boost on the demand side and reach to masses with transparency and deep market intelligence.

OkCredit

OkCredit is a part of the Ok network – an ecosystem of apps aimed at digitizing small and medium businesses (SMBs) across India. With technology that is simple and easy to access, the startup is solving various pain points in the everyday functioning of small business owners, be it tracking their accounts, managing staff at their set-up, or the need to go online. Ok network’s first product- OkCredit was launched in 2017 by Harsh Pokharna, Gaurav Kumar, and Aditya Prasad.

OkCredit has given a complete digital makeover to the traditional register book – ‘Bahi/Udhar Khata’ and made the daily bookkeeping task simpler and effective for millions of small businesses. The app not just helps small businesses keep track of credit transactions – both payments and receivables, it sends timely reminders and also makes it easier for them to collect and settle balance amounts quickly. The app has seen more than 20 million downloads.

OkCredit Launches “#UdharAbhiBaakiHai” Campaign to Help Small and Medium Businesses Recover Pending Dues
Business World, News

OkCredit Launches “#UdharAbhiBaakiHai” Campaign to Help Small and Medium Businesses Recover Pending Dues

Jun 9, 2021 by Rekha Nair 0 Comments ##UdharAbhiBaakiHai campaign, #Associate Director- Growth, #Ayush Jain, #OkCredit

New Delhi: As India is coming out of the devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic and as businesses look to safely re-open in most parts of the country, OkCredit has launched the #UdharAbhiBaakiHai digital campaign to help small and medium businesses recover from a severe cash crunch. This digital campaign urges/encourages customers, both big and small, to clear their pending dues to help small businesses and shopkeepers tide over the financial crunch.

The unorganised retail in India runs on credit. For buyers, it’s about convenience to buy whenever they want and for merchants it’s an effective customer retention tool.

#UdharAbhiBaakiHai campaign is built upon the premise that small and medium business owners/neighbourhood kirana stores served as a pillar of support to masses during the Covid pandemic. They, despite fear of getting infected, went above and beyond to not only ensure a regular supply of daily essentials to communities but also provided credit to distressed families who suffered financial crunch due to loss of livelihood.

The campaign further conveys the message that neighbourhood kirana stores/small businesses have done their bit and it is now time to do our bit to support them through this liquidity crunch. It ends with a call to clear individual dues to small and medium business owners/neighbourhood kirana stores through OkCredit as it can be a good way to begin changing this state of affairs and enable small retailers to serve us with the same vigour, energy, and dedication.

Sharing his thoughts on the campaign, Ayush Jain, Associate Director- Growth, OkCredit said, “ At a time when demand is down, small businesses had to bear the additional weight of outstanding credit on their books, affecting their cashflows and thus income. This was evident in the alarming decline in the number of transactions by small businesses on the OkCredit platform. #UdharAbhiBaakiHai campaign is an attempt by OkCredit to urge people to clear their pending due towards small business owners, local shop keepers, and the kirana stores to ease their financial stress.

Last year, the abrupt lockdown meant that businesses had huge outstanding credit, squeezing their cash flows and pushing them to bankruptcy. This year, however, because of pre- announcement of lockdown, businesses had time to prepare and the situation is slightly better.

According to leading market research firm Nielsen, there are around 12 million kirana stores and over 1 million wholesalers in India. These retailers, who have remained relevant in their neighborhood given familiarity and proximity factors, are facing the double whammy of stock unavailability post-lockdown and difficulty to source supplies from company distributors due to liquidity crunch.

Launched in Hindi, the #UdharAbhiBaakiHai campaign is available on OkCredit’s social network.

AV Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPpa6NDrgwS/?utm_medium=copy_link

About OkCredit:

OkCredit is a part of the Ok network- an ecosystem of apps aimed at digitizing small and medium businesses (SMBs) across India. With technology that is simple and easy to access, OK is solving various pain points in everyday functioning of small business owners, be it tracking their accounts, managing staff at their set-up or the need to go online. Ok network’s first product-OkCredit was launched in 2017 by Harsh Pokharna, Gaurav Kumar and Aditya Prasad, all three of them being batchmates at IIT Kanpur. OkCredit has given a complete digital makeover to the traditional register book – ‘Bahi/Udhar Khata’ and made the daily bookkeeping task simpler and effective for millions of small businesses. The app not just helps small businesses keep track of credit transactions – both payments and receivables, it sends timely reminders, and also makes it easier for them to collect and settle balance amounts quickly. The app has seen more than 20 million downloads and can be accessed in more than 10 Indian languages. Currently, it has over 5 million active monthly users which include over 100 types of businesses like kirana store owners, mobile recharge shops, medical stores, apparels amongst others. The venture has raised $83 million from investors to date including from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tiger Global, and Y Combinator.

OkCredit
Business World

OKCredit Launches ‘co-aid.in’, a hyperlocal search tool to look for medicines and COVID-19 critical equipment in your nearby area

May 13, 2021 by Neel Achary 0 Comments #OkCredit

New Delhi, 13 May 2021: Amid the raging Covid-19 second wave, OkCredit, has announced the launch of a website – Co-aid.in to help people in distress discover verified leads for Covid-19 critical medicines and equipment. The portal provides real-time information on the availability of medicines pan India besides the contact number of the store for making enquiries. Users can search for availability by either entering the location name or the pincode on the portal.

At a time when getting Covid-19 medicines is an onerous task, the initiative is aimed at helping people access such medicines easily by knowing where they are available. The company is open-sourcing data of over 2 lakh pharmacy stores and businesses on its platform. These stores and businesses sell medical products and services such as Fabiflu tablets, oximeters, O2 beds, normal beds, steamers, antibiotics, zinc/vitamin, and oxygen used for treating Covid-19 patients. The data on oxygen and beds has been crowd sourced, whereas the data on medicines is from pharmacy stores on OkCredit’s platform.

OkCredit has plans to further enhance this simple and easy-to-use portal in the coming days and append it with other Covid critical resources available in the public domain. Co-aid.in also allows pharmacy stores and businesses that are not on the OkCredit platform to register themselves on the website.

Within just 12 days of launching, the website has seen queries from 342 towns and cities, within and outside India. Search queries have also come from New York, Singapore, Seattle and Los Angeles among a number of other international locations. In India, highest number of searches have come from Bengaluru, Delhi and Kolkata but smaller locations such as Panipat, Muzaffarpur and Ranchi have also used the tool to search for nearby pharmacy shops.

Besides the pharmacy search tool, OkCredit is also encouraging people to volunteer for Covid-19 SOS requests. Known as Co Aid Volunteer (seen at the top right on the Co-aid.in website), the platform lists out volunteering opportunities for people. These could be oxygen or bed requirements, medicine needs etc. One can search through Covid resources on various platforms to help out such people in need.

Sharing his views on the initiative, Harsh Pokharna, co-founder and CEO of OkCredit said, “People are overwrought with anxiety, fear, and the unending feeling of helplessness amid rising Covid cases. This is a time for mutual collaboration and leveraging human connection to make the lives of Covid patients and their families a tad easier. At OkCredit, we are committed to leveraging our deeper and wider reach within the pharmacy stores and businesses to facilitate the availability of essential drugs and equipment used for treating Covid-19 patients.”

In these challenging times, OkCredit is giving high priority to the welfare of its employees as well. The company recognizes that mental health of employees is a crucial factor in their overall health. Towards this, it is making mental wellness counselling available to them.

Additionally, OkCredit has tied up with Practo, India’s leading online doctor consultation app, to take care of their doctor consultations, covid testing, priority support for ambulances, beds, medicines, mental wellness counseling, etc. The company is also encouraging employees to take time off to take care of themselves and family. It is not counting any time off in the month of May as “official leaves”.

Business
Business World

Festivity Brings Back Merriment to Small Businesses: OkCredit data

Dec 8, 2020 by Rekha Nair 0 Comments #Harsh Pokharna, #Harsh Pokharna CEO, #OkCredit

New Delhi: Festive season has fetched much needed respite to micro, small and medium enterprise sector. These sectors have witnessed faster recovery, particularly sale of sweets, reveals data gathered by OkCredit, the pioneers in digital bookkeeping apps which are fast becoming a new rage among unorganized retailers and traders in India.

Basis the behavior of users, OkCredit gathered data of how the businesses performed during the festive season. According to the data, sale of sweets has gone up by 60% during this Diwali compared to year 2019. This indicates the fervor associated with the festival overcame the fear of pandemic. For other items such as rangoli and lamps the sale has been the same as that of the previous year.

OkCredit data indicates that the growth in transaction on the app was led by kirana and small businesses. These contributed to nearly 55% of this growth even as the overall transactions on the app during the festive period accounted for 12% percent of the transactions for the year 2020.

OkCredit also witnessed an increase in ticket size for jewelry by 16% from the preceding months during the festive season.  This is in sharp contrast to the overall trend of shrinkage in ticket size by 22%, in general, and increase in number of transactions by 47% on OkCredit app during Diwali/ festive season this year in comparison to the same period last year. This signals that merchants are lending smaller amounts which can be accounted to the shrinkage in overall economic activity.

On the business transaction side, the transaction bookkeeping value for OkCredit rose by 13% during this year’s festive season / week when compared with 2019. The company also witnessed highest growth in terms of new merchant addition in Karnataka indicating a growth of 14% during the festive season.

Diwali is known as the end of the financial year with the second day of Diwali marking the beginning of the next fiscal year. OkCredit, during the festive season, settled over 2 million accounts with 80% of accounts being settled in Tier 3 cities. This highlights empowering role modern bookkeeping solution is playing and the trend of micro retail players from small towns and hinterlands embracing digital bookkeeping solutions more than ever before, as it makes their book-keeping task simpler, digitized and secure.

According to Harsh Pokharna, Co-founder and CEO, OkCredit, “The overall growth story of digital bookkeeping industry has been very bullish this festive season with actual transaction figures surpassing our expectations comfortably. This shows how comfortable businesses have become with online bookkeeping even in this pandemic hit year. One clear lesson from this festive season is that digital bookkeeping has become more mainstream than ever and it has proven that with the right technology and features the value proposition of digital bookkeeping is immensely powerful.”

The world is by all accounts gradually reeling out from the pandemic that brought almost the entire population to a halt for months. The good news is that businesses are finally beginning to look up after a bleak streak that lasted months on end thanks to the festive season which is an extremely hectic time for retailers in India.

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Business World

COVID push: Indian small-town retailers going digital with business activity back to normal levels – reveals OkCredit data

Nov 5, 2020 by Gouri Achary 0 Comments #digital, #Harsh Pokharna, #MSMEs, #OkCredit, #small-town retailers

Business activity among the micro, small and medium enterprise sector which are regarded as the backbone of the Indian economy is fast reaching near-normal levels and they are rapidly adopting digital business tools to drive efficiency and growth, reveals data gathered by OkCredit, the pioneers in digital bookkeeping apps which are fast becoming a new rage among hereto unorganized retailers and traders in India.

According to data gathered by OkCredit basis the behaviour of the users, the micro-retail players are increasingly taking up digital bookkeeping solutions, as it makes their book-keeping task simpler, digitized and secure and there is stronger demand coming from small towns and hinterlands.

In the unlock phase of Covid pandemic, OkCredit has witnessed a strong recovery in demand for its app from tier 3 cities followed by tier 2 and tier 1 cities. OkCredit’s business from tier 3 cities witnessed 33% growth in the period of February – September 2020 while Tier 2 and Tier 1 cities registered 30% and 28% growth respectively during the same time. This is after a dip of 26%, 31% and 38% in business from tier 3, tier 2 and tier 1 cities respectively in April this year.

On a pan India basis, data among the digital bookkeeping users point to a sharp recovery with smaller businesses in tier 3 and tier 2 towns growing faster than tier 1 cities. Sixteen of thirty-six states and union territories have recovered to business activity levels that are higher than pre-Covid times. Bihar, Haryana, Assam, Rajasthan, and Himachal are the states where business activity is 10+% higher. Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattishgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, and Punjab are the others that are already exhibiting higher business activity. Out of the 19 states that are yet to recover, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Tamilnadu & Delhi are trending at 90–95% of their pre-Covid activity levels.

At a business category level, different magnitude and pace of recovery was observed by OkCredit since February 2020. The company witnessed double-digit growth in business from medical and Kirana stores at 21% and 15% respectively in September 2020. This was after a dip of 12% in business from medical stores and 22% from Kirana stores in April this year. Both mobile recharge and electronics category registered a modest growth of 5% in September 2020 after a dip in April this year.

According to Harsh Pokharna, Co-founder and CEO, OkCredit, “The best part for us today is that we are able to get a pulse of the business situation among the trader segment which has traditionally been off the radar for all other retail tracking studies, as they largely belong to the unorganized cash economy segment of the country. It is interesting to note that amid the Covid pandemic, remote towns are emerging as the torchbearers for the digitization of the MSME segment. And they are showing exciting activity and growth as the economy pushes hard for a V-curve recovery”

“We have solid proof coming from remote regions of the country where OkCredit app is being adopted like never before and is recording strong growth in transactions. These trends point to a sharp recovery from pandemic induced slowdown among businesses in tier 2 and tier 3 cities as compared to the tier 1 cities,” he added.

What has been helping OkCredit in its growth journey is its differentiated strategy which has also allowed the pioneer to maintain a lead over its follower competitors. Unlike its competitors, who are burning investors cash on marketing spends to primarily acquire downloads, OkCredit has focused on building a robust, feature-rich product that improves the transparency in business transactions and facilitates a higher degree of trust among the participating individuals.

This has helped, OkCredit to not only deliver better customer retention but also generate positive word of mouth through merchants who have found the platform to be simpler and easy to use leading to a strong referral triggered growth pattern. As a result of best-in-class user experience, merchants/retailers today see OkCredit as an integral part of their business. This is further validated by the fact that post-Covid recovery of OkCredit usage has mostly been organic.

Positive word of mouth by the migrant population who have experienced digital tools is driving the adoption of digital bookkeeping tools among small businesses in remote towns of India. This bodes well for India’s digitally connected future and presents a big opportunity to technology service providers to further capitalize on the digital bookkeeping opportunity presented by the MSME segment.

MSMEs are essential to the economy because of their huge commitment to GDP and business, and a solid and productive MSME base which can extend territorially and globally will support broader national economic stability and growth. Empowering micro and small businesses are crucial for the next stage of social and economic growth. Given the current scenario due to COVID-19, more and more consumers are looking online, it provides the potential for MSMEs to transform and build on the digitisation of their businesses. This presents a strong market opportunity for pioneers like OkCredit to continue its consistent and sticky growth journey.