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In the months following the lockdown, small businesses felt the pinch of lack of adequate working capital. Most of them didn’t have access to formal credit and they had to resort to seeking credit from their distributors/suppliers. The distributors/suppliers which were offering credit to some retailers for a short period also backed out, post lockdown, due to the uncertainty in the market. This further aggravated the working-capital crunch for the retailers, making them resort to such options as term loans from lending platforms or loans from informal sources at high rates of interest. That further cut into their earnings.
This fact was noticed by Sanket Shendure and Sanmati Shendure, entrepreneurs based in Goa, and the promoters of MinksPay. Minkspay had been working with over 10,500 small-scale offline retailers on its ‘SmartIncome’ platform for over 2.5 years before market lockdown started in 2020. Minkspay SmartIncome is a mobile application for offline retailers to sell banking and financial services such as Money transfer, Aadhaar Banking, Micro-ATM, bill payments, prepaid recharges and earn up to 50 per cent additional income each month.
In addition to enabling retailers with SmartIncome, Minkspay was building a solution to cater to the working capital needs of the small retailers and the shutdown scenario created an opportunity to launch SmartCredit. Minkspay also realised that the gap in the actual earnings of small retailers, and their potential earnings had been worsened after the market shutdown.
SmartCredit
MinksPay rolled out SmartCredit in mid-November. This product is aimed at providing small scale retailers with credit against their distributor invoices for up to 30 days. This pre-approved credit limit works like a digital OD or CC facility.
“As a next generation OD/CC facility for the retailers, we not only solve their problem by granting them access to easy and instant credit but also for the lenders as the credit is only used by the retailers for one use case paying off their distributor invoices,” said Sanket Shendure, Co-founder and CEO, MinskPay, talking to BusinessLine .
MinskPay SmartCredit has 1,500 retailers onboarded in Phase-I of the launch. The company aims to onboard 50,000 retailers on SmartCredit by end of this fiscal year and three lakh retailers by end of FY 21-22. This it intends to achieve by partnering with mid-to-large-scale FMCG companies and its distributors across the country.
The company currently has a team size of 28 members spread across Goa and Bengaluru.
According to Sanket, currently there are no competitors trying to enable small scale offline retailers in semi-rural and rural areas with a pre-approved digital credit limit to be used against their distributor invoices.
Funding
MinskPay raised $150,000 from Mumbai Angel Networks in September 2019. In August 2020, it onboarded two industry veterans Prateek Aggarwaal, ex-CBO (Lending), BharatPe, and Ravi Linganuri, ex-Target Retail Group, US as investors-cum-advisors.
MinskPay is in advanced stages of talks for raising $1 million to fund its next stage of growth, added Sanket.
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