CreditAccess Grameen, is a micro-finance institution headquartered in Bangalore, focused on providing micro-loans to women customers, predominantly in rural areas. Finding the huge unmet demand for rural credit, the company has spread itself across 132 districts in 8 large states with a network of 516 branches, states a report in Banking Frontiers. It also has as on 31 March 2018, 6306 full-time employees, including 4544 loan officers.
The report quotes Udaya Kumar, MD & CEO, as saying 81% of the customers of the company are in rural areas, against industry average of 38%. “We have 3.2 million active loan accounts and 82% of our branches have been catering to the rural markets. We have calibrated a contiguous district-based expansion strategy, focusing on deep rural penetration. We have 84% customer retention. We prefer to move from one district to a neighbor district and we try to find whether business is viable and good for us. If it is not, then we move out of it,” says he.
The company’s priority is expansion from one district to another good neighboring district, but not directly increasing the number of states. Its market share is 11% and according to CRISIL Research, it was the 3rd largest NBFC-MFI in India in terms of gross loan portfolio as of 31 March 2017. Says Udaya Kumar: “We look for quality and consistency in our business operations, but we don’t work just keeping market share in mind. We want to be in NBFC space only, we don’t wish to diversify into banking.”
– Manoj Agrawal, Group Editor, [email protected]
