Aye Finance

Aye Finance was incepted in 2014 with a simple vision of empowering the micro enterprises of India by providing them timely access to adequate business funding to run and grow their business. There are over 60 million micro enterprises which have struggled with accessing credit from formal lending channels as majority of these enterprises did not maintain formal documentation for their businesses, had no collateral to offer and seldom had prior credit histories. This resulted in a debt gap of INR 16 trillion (IFC Report 2012). We at Aye have designed an innovative Cluster Based Credit Assessment underwriting methodology, and various data analytical scorecards as well as psychometric analysis, which allows us to make risk selection even in the absence of traditional business documentation. By leveraging the advancements in technology and through our deep-rooted understanding of various industry clusters across India, Aye has successfully enabled the inclusion of over 2,00,000 micro enterprises having disbursed over INR 2500 crores to them. With a team size of over 3200, Aye has presence in 18 States through its 211 Branches. Continuing on its journey of providing affordable financing options to micro enterprises, Aye plans to have covered over 5,00,000 micro enterprises in 5 years.What sets Aye apart from other players in the mix is the assisted fintech- approach we use to offer credit to this historically excluded segment. Micro SMEs typically have a scanty digital and financial footprint as compared to their larger market counterparts, making their credit assessment and offering economical line of credit a challenge. While our proprietary, Cluster Based Credit Assessment methodology has allowed us to underwrite the risk, we have also designed our customer acquisition process which mirrors the comfort of the Indian micro entrepreneur who is not comfortable transacting on the internet. We have chosen to set up low cost branch networks to deliver a high touch origination experience to him, and to ensure we maintain economies of scale of our small ticket size loans we have used cloud based business process engine and variety of data models, and optimally automated our underwriting and collections processes. This Indianized approach has provided us among the lowest unit cost of loan origination for business lending in India, and a low rate of delinquencies. Our turning profitable within four years of operations is a validation of the success of this approach. Aye Finance is equity-funded by six reputed investors Capital G (erstwhile Google Capital), SAIF Partners, Falcon Edge, LGT, A91 Partners and MAJ Invest. It also has over a dozen providers who extend their debt funds for its MSME finance business including Indias largest PSU as well as private Bank SBI, HDFC Bank & ICICI Bank and leading global foreign investors like FMO, BlueOrchard, Triodos Investment, Symbiotics, Triple Jump and MicroVest. Aye ranked 14th amongst the top 100 Best Places to Work, by Great Place to Work Institute, a globally recognised authority in creating, assessing, and identifying the best workplaces, across the globe. Aye has also been ranked amongst the best workplaces in the NBFC segment and is part of the top 20 best workplaces in the BFSI industry second year in a row.Aye is delivering outcomes that befit a double bottom line on the one hand, stablishing an efficient, profitable and scalable business and on the other, bringing about a transformative social impact by addressing the disparity in economic privileges of this exclude