Amazon India launches Seller Lending Network

Building on the core value proposition of Amazon.in, the new Seller Lending Network will provide various facilities including wider selection, better value and greater convenience. Sellers can now choose loan offers tailored for their business needs from multiple lenders and loan types (term loans or overdraft loans). They will also save around 150 – 250 bps on interest rates due to competitive rates offered by the lenders. The online process of getting loans will be possible with minimal documentation and a very quick loan approval process of 2-3 days for new loans, and intraday approval for existing loan renewals.

"We are extremely happy to launch the Seller Lending Network, to further simplify and ease access to working capital for sellers through our banking partners. This is in-fact, the first geography where Amazon has built a lending program like this for sellers. Our endeavour is to make the end-to-end process quicker and convenient, allowing sellers to focus on their core business and grow. At the same time we are also focused on giving an enhanced experience to the lending partners - banks and NBFCs through seamless information sharing on seller performance and easy repayment solutions. Interestingly, loan disbursements under our Lending programme have grown 4.5X since 2016 and we have seen that for every rupee that is disbursed an almost equivalent improvement in business is observed by sellers. This gives us confidence that sellers are really looking at us for working capital support and this new programme will further enable them," Gopal Pillai, GM and director Seller Services, Amazon India said.

"Under the Amazon Lending Program, I am able to see multiple loan offers across multiple lenders. This lets me choose the best product suited for my financial needs based on loan amount, rate of interest and type of loan. The end-to-end process is completely online along with uploading documents and the approval time is awesome compared to financial institution offline," said seller Jagjot Singh of JSB Healthcare from New Delhi.

The Seller Lending Network also has Lender Central, a portal for Lenders (similar to Seller Central for sellers), to facilitate exchange of information between lenders and Amazon. Lender Central facilitates information about seller performance data, loan application status and loan portfolio details. In addition, by using Lender Central, lenders can track performance of a seller on Amazon.in real-time, thereby allowing lenders to better assess the sellers and make loan-decisioning models more comprehensive. The lending partners benefit from access to a pool of customers, seamless data exchange and loan repayment, thereby simplifying/reducing their operational overheads.

"FlexiLoans has been working with the Amazon Lending programme for about 8 months now. Launch of the new network has, completely automated lead sharing process and API integration. Lender Central has made our lives much easier with updation of seller performance and ease of  data sharing, among other things that have become a breeze and easy to follow set up of repayment process for the loans and acknowledgement process," FlexiLoans.com, one of the lending partners, said. (RR)

Fibre2Fashion News Desk – India