121 Finance crossed ₹10 crore in cumulative disbursements through the GeM Sahay facility, providing more than 2,600 loans to over 400 micro, small and medium enterprises across 173 cities in 27 states, the company said on 3 June.
PROGRAM USAGE AND REACH
The financing gave MSMEs access to working capital against confirmed government purchase orders, the company said.
GeM Sahay is a credit facility integrated with the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) and built on the Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN), offering collateral-free short-term financing that can be accessed within minutes using government procurement transaction data. 121 Finance was the first lender to launch on GeM Sahay and remains its largest provider, the company said.
The company specialises in small-ticket lending through a collection-controlled model that routes repayments via government order cash flows, and said it had made disbursements as small as ₹127.
CONTEXT AND PLANS
Ravi Modani, founder and managing director of 121 Finance, said India's MSME ecosystem requires credit products aligned with business cash flows rather than traditional collateral-based lending.
Sagar Parikh, a core volunteer at iSPIRT, said GeM Sahay showed how OCEN can enable personalised, cash-flow-based lending at scale.
GeM recorded more than ₹5 lakh crore in gross merchandise value in FY25 and cumulative transactions of more than ₹18 lakh crore since inception, with over 11 lakh MSMEs registered on the platform, according to the release.
121 Finance said it plans to extend similar purchase-order-linked financing to other government procurement ecosystems.
Sources: Fintech BizNews
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