Xiaomi, the country’s No 1 smartphone and smartTV brand, has forayed into online lending, bringing ‘Mi Credit’ into India.
Personal loans upto Rs 1 lakh will be the first product that will be offered through Mi Credit, which is a curated online marketplace for personal loans.
In the pilot phase in November, Xiaomi has through Mi Credit App disbursed personal loans upto Rs 28 crore. “Currently, Mi Credit services more than 10 States spanning across 1,500 pin codes. We will expand its availability to 100 per cent of the pin codes (more than 19,000 pin codes) by the end of March 2020”, Manu Jain, Vice President, Xiaomi Global and Managing Director, Xiaomi India said here.
For the personal loans offering, Xiaomi has partnered with five NBFCs and fintechs—Aditya Birla Finance, Money View, EarlySalary, Zestmoney and CreditVidya.
“We have been talking with Banks as well. Going forward we may bring some of them on board”, Jain told BusinessLine. He also said that personal loans could be utilised for any personal consumption purposes such as travel, education etc and not only for purchase of Mi products.
Mi Credit App
Access to Mi Credit will come through a separate App –Mi Credit App which comes pre-loaded on all MIUI phones and can also be downloaded from Google Play store
Jain also said that Xiaomi has data protection agreements with its partners and asserted they cannot use the data of consumers for purposes other than giving loans.
Hong Feng, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President, Xiaomi Corporation, said that the model for Mi Credit in India is “very similar to what we have done in China”.
It is more about implementation of the same approach after factoring in the regulatory differences and variations in technical infrastructure of two nations.
As on date, Xiaomi has about 45 million users of Mi Credit in China.
Asked if Xiaomi would do proprietary lending (from its own book) for Mi Credit in India, Hong said that for now it will only be a platform in India and not have any own book. “In China we do it from our own book also”, he said.
This Xiaomi move to bring Mi Credit—which is well known in China-- to India comes nine months after Mi Pay, a UPI based payment app, was launched in the country. In these nine months, Mi Pay has got 20 million registered users, Jain said.
Going forward, Xiaomi is open to expanding its financial services offering through Mi Credit to cover insurance and wealth management products, Jain added, but refrained from giving a timeline.