Connecting worlds, transforming lives

Northern Arc (www.northernarc.com) is a financial services platform set up primarily with the mission of catering to the diverse credit requirements of under-served households and businesses by providing efficient and reliable access to debt finance.

Registered with the Reserve Bank of India as a systemically important, non-deposit taking non-banking finance company (“NBFC”), Northern Arc Capital has been operating in the financial inclusion space for over a decade, and is a leading player amongst India’s diversified NBFCs, with a business model diversified across offerings, sectors, products, geographies and borrower segments. We provide access to credit to under-served households and businesses directly and indirectly through our Originator Partners, and operate with a risk management framework that uses a combination of (i) proprietary quantitative data analytics based on a data lake of over 22 million granular loans and pools evaluated by us over the past decade, and (ii) qualitative field-level insights that aid credit assessment and monitoring.

Over the past 12 years, we have been focusing on addressing a wide spectrum of the credit requirements of under-served households and businesses operating in a number of sectors including microfinance, MSME finance, vehicle finance (including commercial vehicle and two-wheeler finance), consumer finance, affordable housing finance and agricultural supply chain finance. We have also pioneered the introduction of multiple innovative products in India such as the first securitization of microfinance loans, first pooled multi-originator securitization transactions (“MOSEC^®”), persistent securitization (“PERSEC^®”) involving securitization of vehicle loans with a replenishing structure, Single Issuer Partially Credit Enhanced (SPiCE ™) Bond and recently, India’s first listed invoice backed securitisation transaction.

Our diversified platform taps into a large network of financial institution partners, technology platforms such as financial technology businesses, and other entities that act as business correspondents to originate financial exposure (collectively, “Originator Partners”) as well as small businesses and individuals. While we lend to such Originator Partners which are in the nature of financial institutions for the purpose of on-lending by them, we also engage with certain Originator Partners who enable us to lend directly to retail borrowers. We also have a large network of investors across different investor classes who use our platform to access opportunities to invest in under-served sectors in India (“Investor Partners”). Our shareholders include several reputed investors such as IIFL Funds, LeapFrog, Augusta, Eight Roads, Dvara Trust, Accion and SMBC. We have, over the years also partnered with several leading global institutions such as United States International Development Finance Corporation, Asian Development Bank, CDC, FMO, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and The Rockefeller Foundation, among others.

We aim to create a consistently profitable business with a strong commitment to ESG goals and impact-creation with a special focus on enabling access to credit to women. Since 2009, when we entered the financial inclusion space, we have through our Originator Partners, impacted over 54.21 million lives across India, of which more than 42 million were women. Our strong ESG commitment aligns us with five out of the 17 sustainable development goals by the United Nations such as ‘No Poverty’, ‘Zero Hunger’, ‘Gender Equality’, ‘Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure’ and ‘Decent Work and Economic Growth’. As a result of our unwavering focus on ESG, Global Impact Investing Ratings System has accorded our impact business model a rating of ‘Platinum’ (on a scale of Bronze to Platinum) thrice in the last five Fiscals, for measures of impactful practices, policies and achievements.

As of March 31, 2021, through our Originator Partners, we had credit exposure, directly or indirectly, spread across 657 districts in 28 states and 7 Union Territories. Since the inception of our platform, we have cumulatively raised over Rs. 1 trillion in funds for our clients, executed over 900 structured finance transactions, built partnerships with over 220 Originator Partners and over 400 Investor Partners, and gathered over 22 million data points on customer repayment behaviour.