Fintech software startup Clear forays into merchants lending

This comes as the company is aggressively focusing on international expansion, and raised $75 million from US-based payments giant Stripe, among others in October last year. The company is now aiming to process $3 billion in merchant-loans by FY’24, it said in a statement.

According to the company, its invoice discounting product will be available to its 3,000 existing enterprise customers, as it looks to provide working capital solutions to suppliers and SMEs.

Invoice discounting allows SMEs to receive loans and credit from financial institutions, against payments and unpaid invoices ‘due’ by other vendors towards them.

“We have deep experience of building fintech SaaS for enterprises which has led us to solve for the burning need of tech-based solutions for SME credit and B2B (business-to-business) payments in the ecosystem. The tech-first supply chain financing products, starting with invoice discounting, will deliver outstanding experience for enterprises and their suppliers,” said Archit Gupta, founder and chief executive officer, Clear.

Clear has partnered with banks and electronic platform Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) to operationalise the supply chain credit for its invoice discounting offering.

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“We are partnering with banks and NBFCs (non-banking finance companies) to operationalize supply chain credit at scale by enabling quick, efficiently priced credit based on actual business performance and not just asset ownership,” Gupta added.

As a part of its offerings, Clear currently provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to corporates helping them pay GST bills, create electronic invoices and pay bills digitally. It also has its ‘BLACK’ consumer offering which helps individuals file for income taxes as well as invest in mutual funds.

Clear claims that almost 600,000 SMEs use its software solutions, and it processes over 200 million business invoices, providing it the necessary underwriting capabilities to scale its lending foray.

ET had also reported on January 13, that global product leaders—including Robinhood’s CPO Aparna Chennapragada, Coinbase’s CPO Surojit Chatterjee, and former Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz executive Balaji Srinivasan— invested in Clear.