MUFG Bank to invest in DMI Finance
MUFG Bank today announced that it has decided to invest INR 19.1bn (USD 230m) in DMI Finance, the digital lending business of the DMI Group. Founded in 2008 and supported by a deeply experienced team across 40+ offices in India, the DMI Group is a pan-India financial services platform with core businesses in digital finance, housing finance and asset management. It has raised over USD 1.5bn of equity investment and is supported by global institutional investors, strategic family offices and leading Indian and international banks.
Existing investor SuMi Trust Bank also participated in this USD 400m round.
MUFG considers Asia as its second home market and has been building a commercial banking platform in Southeast Asia. Amid the recent trend of providing services to underbanked/unbanked customers through digital financial services, MUFG has been making strategic investments in digital financial services. India is a large market where rapid economic growth is expected, as well as development of digital financial services due to the spread of the Internet and various policies promoting digitalization. MUFG has been working to support the growth of Indian startups through the MUFG Ganesha Fund, which was launched in March 2022.
DMI Finance is a Non-Bank Financial Company (NBFC) with a focus on consumer digital lending in India, and is positioned as an important NBFC in the country’s financial system. The company has built a partnership model, providing fully digitalized personal loans and POS loans where the entire application and origination process is completed online within partners’ ecosystems. DMI Finance sources and services customers through multiple digital channels — in particular it is an embedded digital finance partner of choice for leading businesses including Samsung, Google Pay and Airtel which work with DMI Finance to provide diverse financial products to their customers across India.
The company also has an edge in providing services to underbanked or unbanked individuals receiving credit for the first time and had provided credit to a cumulative total of 11 million customers as of December 2022. DMI Finance covers 95% of India’s pincodes and has an accessible customer base that is expected to grow to 40 million+ in FY24. It is projected to disburse over USD 2.5 billion in FY24 across products.
Through strategic investments in digital financial services, MUFG aims to support the growth of its portfolio companies, contribute to financial inclusion in Asia, and aims to capture the growth of digital finance
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