Meanwhile, the Clix Capital management also maintains that the base platform of GE Capital has been given a complete makeover. The addition of nearly 2 million customers (over and above the 1.5 million customer base of GE Capital) is probably also indicative of scale building at a swift pace. Like most of the fintechs, we don’t just have a single product doing payday loans for small business,” Bhasin adds to the argument. “We have scale and we’ll further expand it by diversifying our product portfolio. They do not receive high ratings from credit agencies.” The obvious reference is the AA rating which Brickwork Ratings has assigned to Clix Capital, while specifically mentioning that the company “recently prepaid its Rs200 crore NCD with ICICI Prudential”, a rarity among NBFCs in the current economic scenario. “Most fintechs in India have small loan books and equity base. Point it out to Gandhi, and he will tell you point blank that clubbing Clix Capital with regular fintechs is an unfair assessment. But as the platform has seen the arrival of more players, attaining scale has popped up as a common challenge. So, does it mean the present environment significantly slackened Clix Capital’s pace? “I would rather say, it is a good opportunity to re-set and we have chalked a strategy to deal with this crisis,” Bhasin responds.ĭespite the IL&FS fiasco resulting in drop of credit to the commercial sector by non-banking lenders and the perceptible slowdown in the economy even before the Covid spell, in an overall sense the Indian financial market in recent years on the non-banking side has seen the emergence of a new category of players called Fintechs (promising convenient technology-enabled financial services to the customers). We were quite ahead of our plans till this crisis happened,” says Gandhi. “Our progress has been quite remarkable since our inception on every front. Exceptions notwithstanding, the economy has certainly slipped to a point where caution is the driving mantra of stakeholders across the value chain and there are serious question marks on how established as well as emerging firms will cope with this unprecedented challenge. “We are serving around 3.5 million customers today.” When Bhasin and his team had taken over the command of GE Capital, the company had a customer base of around 1.5 million customers, and is now aiming to reach around 15-20 million with superior technology deliverables to ordinary loan seekers – both retail and SMEs.īut March onwards, Covid-19-led disruptions has battered the basic structure of several businesses – financing is clearly in the forefront, badly bruised by falling incomes (or no income) across consumers and businesses. And though he does not specify, industry insiders say that the former GE duo put in close to $21 million together in the deal with AION India extending a support line of over $140 million.Īnd three years into actual operations, Bhasin strongly claims that Clix Capital has some growing metrics to showcase in terms of meeting with preliminary success on its report card. With the financial support of AION India Investment Advisors, Bhasin (founder of Genpact and former CEO of GE Capital India for a long time) made the acquisition with his partner Anil Chawla (former head of GE Capital’s commercial business). “It will have no bearing on us,” Bhasin says succinctly. Incidentally, the partnership between Apollo and ICICI Venture in AION has come to an end though the parting firms have decided to continue with AION Fund 1 which had raised $850 million (and covers the funding of Clix Capital) till investments are recovered. To put things in perspective, the statement quoted above was made a few days prior to the lockdown in March when in a long conversation at the company’s plush 40,000 sq ft headquarter in Gurgaon, Bhasin and his key team explained the basic elements of Clix Capital’s journey (built on GE Capital’s base turf acquired in 2016) over the last three years.Ī later conversation with Parth Gandhi, senior partner & managing director, AION India Investment Advisors (a joint venture between US private equity giant Apollo Global Management and ICICI Venture forged in 2011), which helped acquire GE Capital and holds over 80 per cent stake, reconfirms that the game has taken off on a high note – much on the lines of what you expect from impact players. But then you can’t afford to take it lightly, coming from someone like Pramod Bhasin, who has been the face of GE in India and instrumental in setting up Genpact for them – a business process services unit for the group which was spun off as an independent entity in 2005. We aim to become the Amazon of financial services in India.” Hearing a statement of this kind, when the global economy is probably suffering the crisis of the century, seems to be out of character with the sweeping sense of gloom prevailing in the market today.
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