Xiaomi, which is currently dominating the smartphone market in India, seems to be actively focusing to score a win in the service segment as well. To further that, the company has today re-launched its personal lending platform — Mi Credit.
Xiaomi has announced that Mi Credit is a curated marketplace for digital lending and will be offering users credit between Rs 5,000 (~$70) and Rs 100,000 (~$1,400). For this, Xiaomi has partnered with a number of startups such as ZestMoney, CreditVidya, Money View, Aditya Birla Finance Limited, and EarlySalary to determine who should get a credit and then finance it.
Xiaomi has also revealed that the users are required to let Mi Credit app access their texts and call logs to look for transactional information and some other details to assess whether they are credit-worthy.
Manu Kumar Jain, Xiaomi India MD and Global Vice President said that with so many partners for the crediting platform, it increases the likeliness of a user securing a loan and added that once the user has secured a credit from the app, they can avail more credit in the future with a single click.
So far, Xiaomi has shipped more than 100 million smartphones in the country and it has now added that Mi Credit app will be preinstalled on all Xiaomi smartphones running Android-based MIUI operating system. The app is also available for non-Xiaomi Android smartphone users from the Google Play Store.
As of today, Mi Credit is now available to users in 1,500 zip codes, or 10 states in India. The company said it plans to extend the credit service to all of India by March next year. It began testing the app with some users in India last month and has already disbursed loans of over 280 million INR (~$3.9 million).
This marks the launch of second finance-related service from the company in India. Earlier this year, in March, the company had launched Mi Pay, a UPI-powered payments application.
