Billarc — цифровое финансирование поставщиков для МСП, работающих с крупными индийскими корпорациями

Comparables: HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis Bank supply chain finance programmes, Indian Bank's SCF (dealers/vendors of MoU anchors, tenor up to 90 days, rates linked to MCLR or repo), TReDS platforms M1xchange (₹78,000 crore throughput in FY24-25) and RXIL, and fintech lenders such as Vayana, KredX and Oxyzo.

Who pays

MSME suppliers (components, packaging, logistics, contract manufacturing) selling ₹1–5 crore a year to an anchor and waiting 45–90 days to be paid — despite the 45-day payment rule of Section 43B(h). A "sale" is a supplier who completes KYC and draws a first discount; 80% become regular users (activation), the rest stay with one-off use. Active = supplier with invoices outstanding in the month. The anchor pays nothing: it gets supplier goodwill and can stretch its own payment terms.

How it makes money

An average active supplier discounts about $12,000 of invoices a month (≈ ₹1.06 million at ₹88 per $); with a 60-day average tenor that is exactly $24,000 outstanding, against a sanctioned limit of about $40,000 (60% used). Interest at 9.5% a year — priced off A-rated anchors, 0.792% a month — earns about $190 a month; an annual limit (renewal) fee of 0.4% of the sanctioned limit, billed monthly, adds about $13. GST at 18% is charged on top of the fee and passed to the government, so it is neither revenue nor cost; interest is GST-exempt. Total ≈ $203 a month per active supplier before cost of funds — the spread, not the fee, is the business.

Key assumptions

• Pricing: SCF and TReDS rates are bid off the anchor's credit and track repo and MCLR — one financier lists 11.65–12.90% on TReDS for weaker paper, illustrative 60-day examples use 10%; programmes backed by A-rated anchors clear lower, so we use 9.5%. Fees: TReDS transaction charges (≈ 0.25% a year of the funded amount) are levied by the platform on the supplier, not by the bank; banks running their own SCF programmes charge an annual processing/renewal fee of roughly 0.25–0.5% of the sanctioned limit — we use 0.4%.
• Cost of funds 6.0% a year (0.5% a month of outstanding) as the FTP for short-tenor assets: HDFC Bank's reported cost of funds including shareholders' funds was 4.4% in Q4 FY26, but the marginal funding for a growing 60–90-day book is term deposits (ICICI FDs up to 6.6%) after the RBI's October 2026 repo hike to 5.50%. Net interest spread is about 3.5% a year before losses and capital — volume, not margin, makes the product.
• Credit and capital: losses 0.4% a year of outstanding (anchor-acknowledged invoices; the risk is dilution, fraud and anchor default, not the MSME); capital charge 12% CET1 on 50% risk weight (A-rated anchors) at 14% cost of equity = 0.07% a month. Ops and platform costs ≈ $6 a month per supplier; KYC, GST and bank-statement analytics plus a field visit ≈ $90 per new supplier.
• Acquisition: anchor activation drives (vendor meets, anchor procurement emails, call-centre follow-up) cost about $300 per activated supplier including the amortised anchor ERP integration; TReDS bidding brings suppliers at about $120 each (platform fees and the ops cost of the first bids); direct selling agents get about 0.5% of the sanctioned limit (≈ $600); Google and LinkedIn for "invoice discounting" at about $0.70 a click, 3% apply, 12% fund. Anchors themselves are won by corporate relationship managers in the team.
• Retention: 94% of suppliers are still drawing after one month, 72% after twelve, then 1.5% a month — suppliers leave when the anchor drops them or a cheaper financier wins the TReDS bid.
• Indian salaries (monthly, gross): head of SCF ≈ $5,700 (≈ ₹60 lakh a year), senior engineer ≈ $2,800, corporate relationship manager ≈ $1,700, credit analyst ≈ $1,600, invoice-operations executive ≈ $700; employer PF and gratuity ≈ 13%.
• Horizon 60 months: a thin-spread lending book only covers the team once it passes roughly $150M outstanding; even at the end of year five the book is small next to HDFC's or ICICI's programmes. A typical anchor brings about 60 active suppliers; each corporate relationship manager runs 15–20 anchor programmes (12 RMs at scale). Principal is funded by the bank's balance sheet and is not in the cash flow — initialCash covers opex, losses and acquisition. Revenue per FTE is counted on gross interest before cost of funds; a thin net margin on gross interest is typical for a spread business.

Risks

• Rate risk: the RBI raised repo in October 2026; if deposit costs rise faster than repo-linked pricing resets, the 3.5% spread compresses — each 50 bp lost costs about $10 a month per supplier, roughly a third of the product's margin.
• Anchor concentration: one anchor can be 15–25% of the book; an anchor downgrade or default hits thousands of suppliers at once.
• TReDS competition: dozens of banks and NBFCs bid on the same invoices; the best anchors' paper clears at near repo-plus-2%, below our cost of funds.
• Invoice fraud and dilution: fake or disputed invoices, double financing across platforms — anchor acknowledgment and GST e-invoice matching are the controls.

How to adapt this model

• Another market (MENA, SEA): change the yield, cost of funds and tenor; in the GCC add 5–15% VAT on fees only; anchors there are often government entities with longer payment terms (90–120 days), which raises outstanding per supplier.
• Dealer finance instead of vendor finance: the anchor's distributors borrow to buy stock — higher yield (11–13%) and higher losses (1–1.5%); change the two percentages and the outstanding volume.
• NBFC or fintech version: raise the cost of funds to 9–10% and the yield to 13–16% (KredX- or Oxyzo-like); the spread widens but funding is the bottleneck.
• The main levers are the yield–FTP spread and outstanding balance per supplier: test FTP at 7.25% (the product turns loss-making at a 2.25% spread) and outstanding at 60% before trusting the payback.

Sources

• Esaf Small Finance Bank, TReDS: interest 11.65–12.90%, tenure up to 180 days — https://www.esaf.bank.in/?p=214939
• Taxguru: RXIL annual fee ₹25,000 plus GST, M1xchange 0.25% per annum transaction charge — https://taxguru.in/corporate-law/treds-trade-receivable-electronic-discounting-system.html
• Indian Bank supply chain finance: dealers/vendors of MoU anchors, tenor up to 90 days, rates linked to MCLR/repo — https://indianbank.in/departments/supply-chain-finance
• CXOToday: M1xchange throughput over ₹78,000 crore in FY24-25 — https://cxotoday.com/press-release/m1xchange-doubles-impact-surpasses-₹78000-crore-in-throughput-achieving-150-growth-in-h2-fy25/
• RBI repo 5.50% after October 2026 hike; SBI one-year MCLR 8.85% — https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/sbi-raises-eblr-and-rllr-after-rbi-hikes-repo-25bps/tldr
• AmbitionBox / Payscale: bank relationship manager pay ₹4–13 lakh a year — https://www.ambitionbox.com/salaries/state-bank-of-india-salaries/relationship-manager
• Devdiscourse: 45-day MSME payment rule (Section 43B(h)) and the supply chain finance gap — https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/business/3916401-indias-45-day-msme-payment-rule-exposes-structural-gap-in-industrial-supply-chain-finance
• HDFC Bank Q4 FY26 investor presentation: cost of funds incl. shareholders' funds 4.4%, NIM 3.38% — https://www.hdfc.bank.in/content/dam/hdfcbankpws/in/en/pdf/about-us/financial-results/2025-2026/quarter-4/q4fy26-earnings-presentation.pdf
• StableMoney: ICICI Bank FD rates up to 6.60% a year (2026) — https://stablemoney.in/fixed-deposit-interest-rates/icici-fixed-deposit-rates