My guest on this, the 73rd episode of our award-winning MVP – The Master’s Voice Podcast Series, is Harsh Pokharna, Co-Founder and CEO of OkCredit, which is empowering the underdogs of India’s retail story through solutions that solve various pain points for small store owners
Harsh had envisioned a career as an entrepreneur ever since he graduated from IIT Kanpur in 2014, and his vision was ‘to create a business that can transform at least a billion lives with the power of technology solutions’, and along with his co-founders Gaurav Kunwar and Aditya Prasad, Harsh created OkCredit, a digital Bahi Khata app for small vendors in 2017.
Together, the three built OkCredit to bring small and medium businesses online, and they have turned the feet-on-the-street model of distribution on its head -- jockeying on digital and the power of the network to grow the reach of the company, which is continuing to cure various pain points for small-store owners.
In fact, ever since it graduated to its lending business around 15 months back, OkCredit has disbursed around INR 120 CR, with most loans of Rs 50000 or Rs 100000, at an average ticket size of Rs 75000, for six to 12 months’ term, and with a very low delinquency rate of 1.5% on 90DPD (Days Past Due) on its out-standings; that is lower than the industry average. This, as one can imagine, has helped the small and modest members of the OkCredit community from India’s retail sector no end.
What’s more, NBFCs are now trusting more and more the OKCredit score on creditworthiness of every candidate even as they do their own stringent due diligence for each.
So tune in to what OkCredit does for and brings to its member-community, which today is 3 million-strong and steadily growing community of registered merchants spread across 95% pin codes all over the country, as Harsh said to me before we started recording. When you consider the total number of such small businesses – around 70 million, per a recent government estimate – that would also need funding for their expansion plans, which they can definitely replay without delinquency, but unfortunately are unable to get such funding from banks, one can see the terrific potential of OkCredit and the vision of Harsh and his two co-founders to empower the underdogs of India’s Retail Story.
Harsh is also a young professional leader who has been featured in the Forbes 30 under 30 list and the Asia 2020, and is a true true believer of the OK philosophy - End of the day, it's all OK.
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