Dana Fintech and Merchant Bay team up to offer embedded digital lending for SME RMG factories

The partnership between Dana Fintech and Merchant Bay is set to facilitate 'end to end' digital lending for SME RMG factories covering digital working capital financing and invoice financing and also to offer financial wellness solutions for worker for same factories through lending partners.

Dana Fintech and Merchant Bay announced a partnership to extend embedded digital lending for SME RMG factories. Under this partnership, Merchant Bay will use Dana’s embedded lending engine to generate business credit score of SME RMG factories to enable them for digital financing through partner banks on same platform for instant end-to-end digitally originated digital SME loan and invoice finance applications.

Merchant Bay is a B2B tech-enabled platforms created as a critical channel for sales, marketing and order management of apparel. Merchant Bay’s multisided platform as a service creates supply chain visibility and make factories take data driven decision to increase efficiency. Merchant Bay is now connected to 300+ SME RMG factories.

Dana Fintech is an embedded lending platform for banks and network partners to offer digital loans and BNPL to SMEs and individuals through digital credit scoring API, BNPL engine and digital underwriting engine. Currently, Dana is working with three network partners and two leading commercial banks.

This tie-up will bring SME RMG factories under digital financial inclusion leveraging data-driven insights and digital lending capabilities for lenders.

Gazi Yar Mohammed, CEO of Dana said, "90% of the SMEs currently cannot avail loans from the formal sector for having neither credit score nor financial documents. On the other hand Banks are reluctant to offer the loans to SMEs because of not having a digital underwriting platform and high lending operation cost. Due to these two pain points SMEs are unable to access to finance. Partnership with Merchant Bay will enable us to create an end to end channel where SME factories will be able to generate their business credit score and avail loans and invoice finance opportunities through our embedded lending engine. Our partner lenders will finance these SME factories. Our goal is to reduce the process time from months to minutes.”

Abrar Hossain Sayem, CEO of Merchant Bay said, "We are delighted to partner with Dana Fintech. Merchant Bay and Dana will jointly come up with an easy solution for SME companies in the readymade garments sector in Bangladesh. We are determined to turn the long process that SME companies currently have to go through with loans and invoice finance into a real time process. Our digital revolution in Bangladesh's readymade garments sector got a new dimension through this agreement."