Hyderabad: IFMR Holdings, a financial inclusion company which offers services such as wealth management to the poor and arranges credit for rural services companies, has raised Rs.12.5 crore from Proparco, a French development financial institution, the company said on Tuesday.
The funds along with the previous fund raise would help the company tap a growth of around 50% this year as it plans to expand its network in all the three streams of operations – IFMR Rural Services, IFMR Rural Channels and IFMR Capital.
Proparco is the private sector financing arm of Agence Francaise de Development (AFD). In August 2015, the company raised Rs.168 crore from Accion, LeapFrog Investments and Lok Capital’s Fund II (Sarva Capital).
“With the latest round we are well funded for the next one year. But as a financial services company we always are looking at raising funds,” said Sucharita Mukherjee, CEO of IFMR Holdings.
On the rural channels front, where it offers wealth management services to the poor by assessing their needs and meeting them with insurance, pension and credit, the company hopes to grow the branch network from 235 to 1,000 in the next 3-4 years.
“Here we would penetrate deeper into each household, by offering 6-7 financial products like insurance and pension, along with micro-credit. The strategic plan now is to improve the non-loan portfolio, even as the microcredit business is growing at around 40-50%. Right now in the 3.5 lakh rural households we are, we have penetrated by 2 products each,” said Mukherjee.
On the other hand, the company also plans to facilitate funding through newer products in the debt credit offering arm IFMR Capital.
“We offer credit of around $2 billion each year to companies in micro-finance, agri-finance, affordable housing and small business finance and vehicle finance, also has growth target of 50%, with the fund management portfolio alone growing 10-20x in the next five years,” Mukherjee said.
Another arm of the business IFMR Rural Finance, a technology licensor for financial institutions, now works with 80 companies.
IFMR Holdings’ revenues for the nine months ended December 2015 stood at Rs.215 crore.
[“source-Livemint”]
