Snapdeal announces an exclusive partnership with State Bank of India for its seller community

New Delhi, India, January 18, 2016: Snapdeal, India’s largest online marketplace, has today announced an exclusive partnership with State Bank of India to further strengthen its ecosystem for its sellers. With this association, Snapdeal sellers will be able to get approval on loans from financers solely on the basis of a unique credit scoring model. There will be no requirement of any financial statements and collaterals.

Sellers on the marketplace can apply for loans online and get immediate sanction, thereby enabling “loans at the click of a button”. This innovative product moves away from traditional lending based on financial statements like balance sheet and income tax returns. Instead, it uses proprietary platform data and surrogate information from public domain to assess the seller’s credit worthiness for sanctioning of loan.

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In May 2015 Snapdeal partnered with State Bank of India to finance working capital requirements of merchants selling on their platform. Pilots were conducted for Snapdeal sellers to apply online for SBI working capital loans through Snapdeal’s Capital Assist platform. This year, Snapdeal will ensure that 10,000 sellers do business of Rs. 1 crore or more each through the platform. Also, the company has recently launched multiple programs such as SD Advisor, Snapdeal Professional Services Panel and Snapdeal’s Ad Platform to assist SMBs and strengthen their business online.

Commenting on the association, Kunal Bahl, Co- Founder & CEO, Snapdeal said, “We take immense pride in our continued and deep partnership with State Bank of India. SBI and Capital Assist have teamed up to provide capital access to SME’s selling on Snapdeal basis unique credit scoring model without any financial statement and collateral. This initiative is in line with our aim of creating 1 million successful online entrepreneurs. We are working tirelessly to ensure ease of doing business for our sellers by helping them with marketing, selling, distribution, warehousing, training and capital availability. We are glad to have SBI as a partner in this critical mission of taking SME lending in India to a new paradigm. Partnerships are key to building a digital payments ecosystem. In our journey to make commerce friction free we believe digital payments are critical. At Freecharge, which is the fastest growing digital payments service in India, our endeavour is to make a “less cash” Digital India a reality. Going forward SBI and Freecharge will work collaboratively on a variety of digital payment services and expand merchant acceptance of digital payments across India.”

Arundhati Bhattacharya, SBI chairman, said, “The e-Commerce growth has created a whole new ecosystem enabling more than 5 lakh sellers to sell their products on a digital platform. In the process, it has also opened up a wide new world of opportunities for the banking industry – ranging from personal segment products like consumer finance and wallet to business lending for merchants and other service providers in the backend. It is now upon us to leverage these opportunities. Doing so requires us to think and go beyond the traditional banking products and delivery services. With this new facility sellers can apply for the loan online on the e-commerce platform and get instant sanctioning of the loan. Platform performance data enables us to assess the merchant’s credit worthiness without relying on traditional financials like Balance Sheet and Income Tax Returns. There is abundance of surrogate information like social media footprint, regulatory filings, that is available in the public domain which can be leveraged to assess creditworthiness. The product is also in line with our focus on building a risk mitigated portfolio.”

Initially, sellers can avail working capital loans upto Rs. 25 lakhs. Loans upto Rs.10 lakhs are collateral free and carry a very competitive interest rate. There is a special concession of 25 basis points for women entrepreneurs. All loans below Rs. 10 lakhs will also get covered under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana Scheme of Government of India.

The Bank had hired management consulting firm The Boston Consulting Group to facilitate development of this credit model.

SBI and Snapdeal are exploring collaboration opportunities on various other areas in the digital banking space.

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