FROM THE FOUNDER’S DESK

After 3 decades of working in local & global banks, one had strong conviction about one market that is sizeable and yet clearly under-served: micro & small enterprises in semi-rural & semi-urban markets. APAC Financial was founded in 2018 with focus on building a specialised MSME lending platform that delivers credit to underbanked micro & small enterprises in India. These are the 70 million businesses that are the backbone of our country – they account for 30%+ of India’s GDP and employ 100+ million people – but remain underserved. There is a Rs. 80 trillion MSME credit gap in India, which grows year on year – this is the size of APAC’s opportunity. APAC exists because we believe that all deserving micro & small businesses should focus on growth instead of being constrained by access to capital.

APAC has in-house developed an origination, underwriting & customer service technology platform “Alpha,” which helps us offer assessed income-based lending to this vast customer segment. Alpha transformed what is a time consuming, document heavy and opaque process into a customised, hassle-free and highly digitised approach. I have great pride that APAC has already lent to 35,000+ customers in 175+ locations, which shall over the next few years grow multifold to lakhs of customers. Our customers are micro businesses that we interact with every day – kirana stores, animal product owners, vegetable & fruit traders, plumbers and painters, among many others. Beyond extending a loan, I feel proud that APAC has genuinely impacted lives of our customers: majority of APAC’s loans have women as primary or co-borrowers and for a large number of APAC’s customers, APAC’s loan is their maiden entry into India’s formal credit system.

While we grow our customer base, I am equally focused on growing APAC’s ‘customer delight’. We are building a customer centric organisation, focused on delivering fair, transparent & quick service to our customers – whether that is via our well-trained sales teams in the branches, centralized customer service agents or via our customer mobile app. All our customers are sourced directly via our well-trained on the ground sales teams, who are empowered by Alpha’s mobility solution. We consistently measure our customer satisfaction by our Net Promoter Scores and yet we have miles to go in our customer delight journey.

In addition to our MSME specialization & digital platform Alpha, it is our experienced & innovative team operating with high governance standards, that has helped APAC achieve strong successes. What adds to our differentiation is that the APAC leadership team has invested a significant amount of their own capital along with me into APAC. To ensure wealth creation for all, we have an employee friendly ESOP program right to the branch relationship managers, a unique in our industry. So customers and employees are both aligned to APAC’s success, as much as APAC is to their welfare & successes.

Since inception, we have been disciplined on our mantra of building APAC by balancing G.Q.P. (Growth, Quality & Profitability). Our focus is not on footfalls or eyeballs. Not in growing top-line with expanding losses in the bottom-line. We respect capital, be it from self, leadership team or our institutional & other investors, as much as from banks who have provided us with attractive leverage. We genuinely believe we are a strong & sustainable growth-oriented firm to partner with, with authenticity & fairness.

Look forward to having you join APAC’s journey -as a delighted customer, proud employee, happy investor or fair partner. We hope to build & nurture our relationship with you.