Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Gowrisankara Alamanda: The founding team of arthan has great experience working in financial inclusion segment. India is a credit starved country with access to finance, still a challenge particularly to MSME segment which is the growth engine of the country. The root cause of this is due to information asymmetry, informal nature of the business and risks associated with the MSMEs. With our good understanding of markets, technology and suitable product offering, Arthan want to address this gap using superior technology stack. Arthan, as a Fintech NBFC has a USP to serve this segment in most efficient manner with great customer experience.
Great Companies: What are the various services provided by Arthan Finance Pvt Ltd
Gowrisankara Alamanda: We provide comprehensive financial solutions to the small businesses. We provide the growth capital required to MSMEs in the form of
1. Term loans
2. Unsecured loans
3. Structured products in any Supply chain which includes products like invoice discounting, vendor financing etc.
We want to be a financial solutions provider to MSME ecosystem by providing services like savings, insurance and ancillary services like GST services, Business accounting etc.
Great Companies: What makes Arthan Finance Pvt Ltd from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Gowrisankara Alamanda:
Arthan Finance is uniquely placed among its competitors. Most of the NBFCs/FinTech are uni-channel/Single Product company whereas Arthan focuses on phygital channels with multiple channel of acquisition which will help in scaling the business and also bring in efficiency. Our major competitors are Banks, Small Finance Banks, NBFCs with MSME focused lending, FinTechs in the supply chain finance domain.
Our customers are small businesses across the country and we are currently present in 28 states through our digital presence. We reach out to our customer through various channels like our physical smart branch infrastructure and our direct sales team, FinTech and aggregators who work with these MSMEs, Micro Finance Companies and through various trade associations. Major USPs Arthan has are,
We are a cashless and paper less organisation. We have created mobile bases loan origination system which is very modular and many microservices are plugged in into the system to give a seamless and quick onboarding experience to the customer.
Arthan has create a data lake which stores all types of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data like application data, bureau data, transaction related data, mobile device data etc. The credit model is created basis these data and through AI & ML, the models are trained on each and every transaction to give better output.
Great Companies: What were the struggles and challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
Gowrisankara Alamanda:
The biggest hurdle is in building the right team. This one input is unique as they have aspirations, feelings and various levels of capacities. We need to build confidence to work with a startup and believe in our long term story. If the employees are capacitised and got conviction in our mission there is no looking back. We have lot of HR interventions in terms of talking to people at the lowest level and direct access to the CEO to even the lowest level employee. Coupled with that we provide generous ESOP to make them part of the growth story and also do frequent townhalls to address people concerns.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for Arthan Finance Pvt Ltd?
Gowrisankara Alamanda:
The company aspires to be central and eastern focused NBFC where the credit to GDP ratio is pretty low and wants to help small businesses in these geographies. While saying so, the company is already present in 28 states through digital channels and will further extend its reach all across. By FY 26, Arthan Finance wants to create portfolio of INR 2000 crores and help more than 10 lakhs small businesses to avail growth capital for their business. We are also in the process of creating a world class technology platform backed by AI & ML based underwriting which can be used by many lenders in India/globally to help this particular segment of the customer.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Gowrisankara Alamanda: There are no short cuts to growth and value creation. Do not have a FOMO factor but build the basics right to make the organisation sustainable and future ready. Get the pulse of customers and employees on real time to get your course correction.