Ahmedabad- and Bangalore-based fin-tech firm Lendingkart has appointed GS Sundararajan, former India head of non-banking finance company Fullerton, to its board as an independent director, a person directly in the know said.
Sundararajan has joined the boards of both Lendingkart Finance, the NBFC arm, and Lendingkart Technologies, the technology and digital marketing arm.
“His guidance and support will propel us towards building a great financial services platform for the under-served SMEs in India,” Harshvardhan Lunia, chief executive and co-founder of Lendingkart, said in an e-mailed statement.
An engineer and management graduate from IIM Ahmedabad, Sundararajan has more than 28 years of experience in banking, management, strategy and planning. In his earlier stints, he served as CEO and managing director at Fullerton India Credit Limited.
Fullerton India is the wholly-owned subsidiary of Fullerton Financial Holdings Pte Ltd, which, in turn, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd, the Singapore government’s sovereign fund. It offers a range of financial services for small and medium-sized enterprises.
“Lendingkart Group has been pioneering SME lending through an algorithm-based credit approach. The company has already laid a strong foundation to build this framework based on digital data,” Sundararajan stated.
Sundararajan has also served as group director at diversified financial services company Shriram Group. Besides Lendingkart, he also serves on the board of Paytm Payments Bank, Shriram Equipment Finance Ltd, and Hinduja Housing Finance Ltd.
Lendingkart Group was founded in 2014 by Lunia and Mukul Sachan. A chartered accountant by qualification, Lunia had earlier founded Domestic Finance and Investment Pvt Ltd, a company involved in designing and arranging credit solutions for SMEs in India. He also had stints at ICICI Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and HDFC Bank.
The company has raised a total of $37.6 million (Rs 243 crore) in equity from Bertelsmann India, Mayfield, Saama Capital, Sistema, Darrin Capital and India Quotient, among others. It has also raised more than Rs 300 crore in debt from a clutch of banks and financial institutions that include IFMR Capital, YES Bank, Kotak Mahindra, Caspian Impact Investments Pvt. Ltd and Capital First, among others.
In an interaction with VCCircle in June this year, Lunia said the company was planning to raise an additional Rs 500 crore in debt and will disburse Rs 1,500-1,600 crore worth of loans in 2017-18.
