Making Millennials Creditworthy

ZestMoney is helping people avail loans despite a low or no credit score

- Sampurna Majumder

As an age cohort, millennials fall within the bulge bracket of India’s earning populace. However, when it comes to managing their finances Indian millennials somewhere miss out on major pointers. Yes. In an effort to realize their life goals, they often look for loans despite a low credit score. And numbers of such individuals are increasing with each passing day.

Tapping into this very demographic space, Bangalore-based fintech company ZestMoney has been successfully lending out the required financial support to lakhs of millennials and Gen Z. Speaking to Outlook Money, fintech’s founding trio says, “We believe in providing affordable, digital, small ticket consumer credit to the masses.” They further go on to mention that, a certain data share by the Reserve Bank of India, states that annually, roughly 4.5 crore credit cards are issued in India annually. However, a lot of duplicity is often reported in the process.

Given the duplicity and dormancy, that suggests around two crore people are actively using credit cards (maybe less), which is less than five per cent of the adult population, a minuscule number in a global context. At the same time, UPI adoption is skyrocketing and we believe more than 40 crore people are transacting and interacting online today. For these people, a new form of finance is needed, they further add. “This is what we focussed (a new form of finance) on and hence decided to leverage,” says Sharma, chief operating officer, ZestMoney.

Priya Sharma, Lizzie Chapman, and Ashish Ananatharaman, the trio first met while working at Wonga—a London-based payday loan provider. Later when Chapman moved to India, the three met yet again only to zero in on a certain business idea and then the rest, as they say—is history.