Sanjay Sharma – Founder, Managing Director and CEO @ Aye Finance

Sanjay Sharma is Managing Director of Aye Finance, a fintech company that provides commercial loans to micro and small businesses. He graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He has over 30 years of consumer finance experience.
In the fintech space, lending firm Aye Finance is one of the startups that has raised a lot of money during the lockdown. From a second round of investment by Google investment fund Capital G to fresh funding from Germany-based impact investment firm Invest in Vision, his six-year startup has been busy. Sanjay Sharma talked about why he brought in big investors like Capital G and why they are bullish on Indian micro-enterprises.
Shortly after Capital G first invested in the startup two and a half years before him, Sharma found himself in the fund’s top 10 machine learning camp. Sharma then went to meet with Capital G’s management team and asked how Aye Finance had created an investment trump card. The answer was data.
“They told me in conversations with multiple companies, from payments to e-commerce, that the answer to how they plan to make money was always to sell data to lenders. Told. So Capital G turned to a lending startup,” Sharma told Business Insider.
He added that the credit gap for his 6 billion micro businesses in India is estimated at £16 trillion, which is a huge opportunity for them.
For Aye Finance, the strategy during COVID-19 was to invest in low-risk areas to sustain the business. Sharma explained that her portfolio is split across different industries, and her data research team found that only 15% of them were severely affected by the pandemic. . “These are typically non-essential manufacturing companies. The rest of the portfolio had a moderate to minor impact,” he said.
Sharma is optimistic about his business strategy and sees great growth opportunities in India. “India has a huge potential in terms of credit as credit penetration is very low.In order for India to become a developed country, it needs better credit flows for people doing business.” He said