Introduction:
Cooperatives occupy an important position in the economic activity of the country and have been acting as a catalyst for socio-economic development. The cooperative sector has made remarkable progress in the past few years; however, they still face many problems.
Today, moneylenders face limited access to capital, these lenders often have to seek funding from other sources, which can result in interest rates as high as 35-40%. Furthermore, Manual bookkeeping to keep track of P2P loans is laborious and time-consuming. It leads to various inefficiencies due to complex interest calculations, wrong entries, and no data backup. At present, lower-tier lenders still use offline or legacy software. There are delayed payments, no business Intelligence, no transparency & no spontaneity.
Harsh & Himanshu, two of the three co-founders of Byajbook, are childhood friends who had a common friend owning a jewellery store. They learned that most of these businesses were not using any lending software for lending management and the rest were using softwares which had a high subscription fee with only 20-30% utilisation, as a lot of the features required by them were missing.
Mukesh & Harsh were batchmates at IIT Madras, they researched for existing softwares providing this solution but couldn’t find any. Post that they started doing market research by speaking to jewellers and MSME’s in Ahmedabad & MP. With the insights they received they launched a prototype in June 2021. The prototype was very well-received and they managed to onboard more than 220K users.
Byaj Book provides credit line to lenders in the informal sector, particularly in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Further, it helps these lenders to manage their peer-to-peer (P2P) loans and debts through their mobile phones. It allows users to create loans, add payments, send manual/automated payment reminders, generate transaction reports, etc. The platform provides a simpleuser interface for easy management of all interest-based loan accounts in multiple languages. Byaj Book aims to provide a centralised solution that is both Safe and Simple.
Market Opportunity
The credit economy in India has witnessed unprecedented growth in the last few years. Digital lending is forecasted to reach $350 billion in 2023. The cash-driven informal credit and shared spending market among the households in India is now a massive $500 billion and $600 billion for SMBs which has a vast digitisation potential. Out of this, Byajbook will be initially targeting individual lenders, MSMEs and SHGs and currently, India has over 6.6 million SHGs with 72 million members.
100X.VC Thesis
Lending still remains a huge opportunity for India - and solutions to provide access of capital to money lenders, manage P2P loans and debts and building an automative offering for manual book-keeping is a large market. Byajbook founders are young, energetic and driven to build in the space. Digitising this 300+ billion opportunity is what 100X wants to build along with founders.
Conclusion
With the rapid rise of tech solutions and growing comfort with digital payments, we believe that the time is right for a digital sharing solution to emerge in the market. The Byajbook team is passionate and has the right expertise. We wish the team all the luck!
