Fintech Lender HAPPY bootstraps its way to facilitate wealth creation of INR 1800 crores for the ‘credit invisible’ micro-MSMEs in India
Manish Khera, Founder & CEO, HAPPY
HAPPY, the MSME Digital Lender, established in 2017 by industry veteran and serial entrepreneur Mr. Manish Khera, announced today that it has so far catalysed huge wealth creation of more than INR 1,800 crores for its 3.5 lakh unique customers in India borrowing through its platform and institutional lending partners.
HAPPY has facilitated disbursement of credit worth more than INR 500 crores across 18,400 pincodes throughout the length and breadth of the country. This has uniquely benefitted 3.5 lakh nano, micro and small businesses across 80+ categories including grocery, apparel, restaurant, business correspondents and others. HAPPY’s ability to underwrite and disburse credit to businesses that were first-to-credit and revolve it to grow their business manifold, has turned out to be a win-win situation. Timely availability of credit to these businesses has catalysed an exponential growth in their wealth.
HAPPY, API-based digital lending platform, aims to reach 1million customers by 2023, with at least 40% of them being new to credit, thus inching closer to its vision of bringing the credit invisible micro-MSMEs into the formal credit ecosystem and accelerating nation’s inclusive growth agenda.
Manish Khera, Founder & CEO, HAPPY, says, “While there are multiple players tiding the digital lending boom in India, the micro-MSME segment is still excluded from flexible and timely access to credit. Moving beyond a straight jacketed approach, we have pioneered sachetization of credit in the form of immediate working capital credit attuned to the occupational cycles of micro-MSMEs. Our robust product tech platform is great for partners and lenders to expand into the MSME segment. The milestones we have achieved while remaining bootstrapped startup is a testimony of our customers’ creditworthiness, valuable partnerships and a strong committed team. As an Indian entrepreneur, I see HAPPY as supporting the hard work of lakhs of micro-entrepreneurs by providing them venture capital”
The evolution of HAPPY’s business model was based on solving barriers to affordable digital credit to micro-enterprises at scale and ease. The deep learning and insights have helped the lending platform to be agile and suitable for multiple micro-MSME sectors.
HAPPY’s fully digital platform embeds seamlessly with lending institutions and aggregator networks including POS, payments, wallet, food-tech, agri-tech and others, with the potential to scale credit access to tens of millions of micro-enterprises.
HAPPY through its paper-less, human-less, and application-less digital lending model makes unsecured short-term working capital credit available to the underserved micro-enterprises. The firm has integrated its lending APIs and machine-learning decision models with many of the largest payment, food tech and other aggregator networks in India, reaching over 3.5 million potential borrowers. HAPPY’s proprietary alternate data-led credit model is capable of multi-sector underwriting and has shown one of the best results in the industry so far.
In the coming years, HAPPY aims to become a partner of choice for lenders and aggregator networks to service, engage and retain millions of micro-MSMEs with its scalable, fully digital and flexible lending platform.
About HAPPY
HAPPY is a fast-growing fully digital lending Fintech targeting a multi-billion-dollar credit gap in India’s micro-MSME segment, delivering flexible & easy short-term access to credit for nano, micro and small business owners in urban & city settings. Founded & promoted in 2017 by successful serial entrepreneur and angel investor Mr. Manish Khera, HAPPY has so far disbursed credit worth more than INR 500 crores to its 3.5 lakh unique customers across all states in India.
In order to plug the $380 billion MSME credit gap in India, lending needs to be done at a massive scale to the 63 million micro-MSMEs in India, most of which have been excluded from flexible and timely short-term working capital from formal institutions. This is because they lack financial statements, formal registration, and it is too costly to physically appraise their operations.
With its well-tested robust product technology and credit engine, HAPPY addresses these weighty impediments to financial inclusion of micro-MSMEs in a financially viable manner at scale driving socio-economic impact.
