The largest smartphone company in India, Xiaomi, has started a credit platform designed to attract young professionals and millennials in the country, according to a report by TechCrunch.
The new venture is an app called Mi Credit, and it’s a marketplace for personalized lending, offering users credit between Rs 5,000 ($70) and Rs 100,000 ($1,400). Xiaomi said it offers a “low” interest rate.
In developing the lending venture, the Chinese electronics company partnered with a few different FinTech startups, including ZestMoney, which is based in Bangalore. Other FinTech partners include CreditVidya, Money View, Aditya Birla Finance Limited and EarlySalary.
The Mi Credit app accesses a customers call logs and texts to search for information on transactions, as well as other details, to determine a person’s credit worthiness.
Xiaomi Vice President Manu Jain said the process only takes a few minutes, and that eligible applicants get credit right away.
Because of the number of firms Xiaomi has partnered with, the company said that it’s highly likely a person will get credit. Once a customer has gotten credit, they can usually get more with a single click.
Startups can capitalize on this by taking advantage of Xiaomi’s large user base, one of the partners said. The company has shipped over 100 million smartphones in India. The Mi Credit app is going to be preinstalled on all smartphones released by the company that run its Android-based MIUI operating system. It’s also available in the Google Play Store, but it won’t be available to iPhone users.
Xiaomi Co-Founder and Senior Vice President Hong Feng said the company understands how its 300 million users operate.
“It is one of the strengths we aim to leverage to build a stronger Mi Finance business globally. We see a huge opportunity for consumer lending in India with estimations reaching up to $1 trillion dollars in digital lending by 2023, as per a report from BCG. This makes us believe that our Mi Finance business, based on solutions such as Mi Pay and Mi Credit can truly revolutionise the Indian FinTech industry,” he said.