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LendingKart plans to go for an IPO in the next six-eight quarters, as the lending company recorded ₹45-50 crore in profits last year (at group level).
LendingKart Group reported ₹511 crore of gross revenue in FY21, as compared to ₹485 crore in FY20. Co-founder and CEO of LendingKart, Harshvardhan Lunia, told BusinessLine that the company has been profitable for the past three to four years and LendingKart’s shift to a co-lending model has helped increase its profits.
Post-pandemic growth
The co-lending business adoption accelerated after the Covid-19 outbreak. “It was slow moving before Covid but after the pandemic, a lot of larger institutions wanted to reach out to Tier 3, 4 towns and other regions where they do not have branches and that’s where we come in,” said Lunia.
When co-lending started in 2019-20, ₹160-170 crore of loans were disbursed on LendingKart platform, followed by ₹260 crore in 2020-21 and over ₹1,300 crore this year. Further, Lunia expects to clock about ₹3,500-4,000 crore worth of loan disbursements in next year.
In the co-lending model, the capital is provided by the banks, NFBC, small finance banks etc and LendingKart brings the customers and services them. From digitally originating the loans to loan underwriting and collecting the loans, the whole process is done by LendingKart.
“Our growth story is also outlined by our transition from having a balance sheet of our own to becoming a platform business. We currently have 20 partners who have given about ₹3,000-crore lines to us for the coming year; so my next 6-9 months of business is pre-sold to these large institutions, where we will work as a partner with them,” said Lunia.
Benefits of co-lending
Talking about the benefits of a co-lending model, Lunia noted that raising money from banks and institutions, managing liquidity have its own costs. But if the company is originating the customer and the customer is getting booked at some other banker directly, they don’t have to do asset-liability management or keep cash flows at their end. It also increases the company’s scale.
In FY22, LendingKart’s disbursements totalled to ₹9,108 crore and has customers across 11,000+ pincodes. The group is financed by international investors such as Fullerton Financial Holding (FFH), Bertelsmann, Mayfield India, Saama Capital, Sistema Asia and India Quotient, among others. The company has raised around ₹1,050 crore of equity till date.
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