Riding on increasing appetite for digital services in the country, car market leader Maruti Suzuki is targeting 50% of its customers’ car-financing transactions to be executed through the company’s ‘Smart Finance’ platform by March 2022. This will translate into a disbursement of about ₹35,000 crore, a senior company official said.
Currently, the company has disbursed about ₹6,500 crore loans through the platform to about one lakh via Smart Finance platform, accounting for 28% of all finance-based car purchase transactions for the company.
“Maruti Suzuki Smart Finance has achieved a milestone of one lakh customers, out of which 90,000 customers came on board in the last four months. It has been an exponential increase. In value terms, we have disbursed more than ₹6,500 crore of financing through the platform,” Shashank Srivastava, Senior Executive Director (Marketing & Sales), Maruti Suzuki India, said.
With 80% of cars in India being bought using financing options, Maruti Suzuki had launched its online car financing solution ‘Smart Finance’ towards the end of last year amid increasing demand for digital services. Initially, the service was available for Nexa channel customers, accounting for roughly 20% of the company’s entire sales. This was expanded to all customers across India this year in July.
For the ‘Smart Finance’ platform, Maruti Suzuki has tied up with 14 financiers, including, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Yes Bank, Axis Bank, State Bank of India, IndusInd Bank, Bank of Baroda, Karur Vyasa Bank, Cholamandalam Finance, AU Small Finance Bank and Mahindra Finance.
“We have set a very aggressive target of 50% by the end of next quarter… We are also planning improvements on the platform, including more personalised predictive model based on artificial intelligence...This will help give further push to our volumes,” he added.
Mr. Srivastava added, “The potential for this (platform) is immense. It covers all kinds of buyers which means we can actually go up to 100% of our financing through Smart Finance. It is only a matter of time, and customer and dealer education,” he said.
---
Yuthika Bhargava
The Hindu
