Serving the small guys

• Ever opted to pay for a home appliance in installments while shopping online? Embedded credit like this provide customers with credit services while offering a richer, more seamless experience within a single platform.
• Small businesses and solopreneurs benefit from it too as they are often denied credit services due to their small size and the difficulty of easily assessing their creditworthiness.
• Here’s where 500-backed fintech platform CrediLinq comes in — their mission is to provide platform-based small businesses and solopreneurs with equitable and hassle-free access to the capital they need to grow.
• Co-founders Deep Singh and Vikram Kotibhaskar see the potential for significant contribution and profitability in such businesses – for example, the thousands of merchants on platforms like Etsy, or the freelancers on a marketplace like Fiverr.
• These underserved businesses usually lack the traditional documents needed by banks to assess their creditworthiness, but CrediLinq believes their large digital footprint on these platforms over time offers alternative data and behavior that can be expertly used to assess creditworthiness at a deeper and more accurate manner.
• There is a wide variety of data that banks currently don’t consider, such as sales, refunds, late payments, and more. These can be used to create a comprehensive credit model that provides lenders and borrowers with a more realistic assessment of creditworthiness at the platform and merchant or solopreneur level.
• “We know small business owners are the backbone of the global economy. There’s a huge demand for access to growth capital,” Vikram shared. “By being micro-service driven and cloud-first, we can deploy and scale their infrastructure across geographies swiftly, offering a fast go-to-market for their platform partners.”
• “We are operating now in India, SE Asia, and Indonesia, but see exceptional potential in Europe, U.S., and Latam and are eager to enter those markets,” he added. “We hope that as we continue to expand around the world, the first question a new merchant might someday ask their platform is ‘Do we have access to CrediLinq?’ I think we’ll get there.”
• Read the full story on Forbes.