NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Your mobile wallet, which has been serving your need for instant cash in an electronic form for sundry transactions, will also empower you further with companies in the business planning to add an instant loan facility to their offerings.

The fast pace of mobile banking growth, coupled with increasing appetite for smart phones among the billion-plus mobile phone subscribers, is what is prompting companies such as Payworld, One MobiKwik and Paytm to add another feature to what currently serves as an electronic debit card. Stakeholders maintain mobile banking is becoming a big business, with 39.49 million transactions worth Rs.49,000 crore. People are no longer averse to using their mobile phones for transactions. They expect mobile wallet business to also grow exponentially from around Rs.1,200 crore now.

“We’ll soon be rolling out our micro-credit programme. Users can subscribe to small loans and we get interest on repayment. Pilots have been done already. We are awaiting procedural approvals. We expect to launch early-May,” One MobiKwik Systems founder Bipin Preet Singh told IANS. “It’s instant. An eligible user will get the loan instantly credited to the wallet. In the pilot stage, we gave small loans from Rs.100-500. Once the programme is rolled out for everyone, users would be able to take loans in excess of Rs.5,000,” Singh said.

What does it entail? Mobile wallet companies are tying up with commercial banks and non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) to roll out of the service, which will analyse the history of the users before crediting the loan. Mobile wallet companies, on their own, cannot give loans. “We’ve had discussion with the NBFCs to provide micro and nano loans to mobile wallet customers. We will use transaction analysis of the user and provide the same to the NBFC. They will then approve the loan,” Payworld chief operations officer Praveen Dhabhai told IANS.