EarlySalary Launches Digital Card With RuPay; Eyes 5X Growth In One Year

Pune-based lending platform EarlySalary is doubling down on issuing fresh loans and targeting strong growth as the country prepares for the festive season amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The startup also launched a new digital card in partnership with RuPay to enable a new form factor of payments for its customers who can apply for the card through its mobile app. The digital card will have flexible credit lines for different forms of purchases across categories like shopping, education, consumer durables and others. EarlySalary has set a target to grow their balance sheet by five times over the next one year and is hoping to get 25 percent of the loans from the consumer and personal loan segment. Buoyed by its efficiency of collections and strong asset quality even during the pandemic, EarlySalary has pushed out its check out finance business, card business, and the edtech credit product over the last few months, when the lending sector hunkered down. “We had gone down to doing around 20,000 loans during April to May, which has now come back to 35,000 and by January 2021 we are looking to get back to 75,000 loans per month which was our pre COVID number,” he said. Mehrotra believes the country will bounce back from the economic downturn, consumption will come back during the festive season, and EarlySalary will be able to leverage that opportunity and get good customers going forward.