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Dear Friends ,
I hope everyone is still keeping safe. Work from home and online engagements have now become a part of our everyday life. We at IvyCamp, have been continuing our online engagements through activities like AI product showcases and startup scouting for our corporate partners, online startup-mentor engagements, startup and webinars for our network. We have headed into a new environment to run a company, to invest, to start a business, engage with customers, and our whole every day life. These circumstances continue to change almost on a daily basis as we learn more about the situation. In our global network, many questions are coming up on how to plan for a sustainable way forward.
To have debate and share answers to these questions, this week we launched a new Webinar Series IvyCap – Imagine that is designed to engage with business leaders and investors in India and overseas to help us Imagine the future and be creative about generating opportunities and solving challenges. Our speakers will include CXOs, Investors, Academicians and other thought leaders who help us navigate through these difficult times and identify opportunities in a fast changing world
Episode 1, in partnership with IVCA, focused on The new consumer Post COVID, where we had a fantastic panel of international leaders. We had a great discussion and many interesting questions were raised by the attendees. Imagine will be an ongoing series focused on topical issues so we would love to hear back from you on topics you would like to hear with our experts on.
We continue to engage with our startups to support them through these tough times and if you would like to share your expertise please do contact us
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How has the COVID19 pandemic affected your business so far?
We work with micro merchants and small business owners who were completely shut during the lockdown phase. Needless to say, it did impact our sales and collections ability, except the essential services which saw a surge in demand. Post April, our business picked up good pace as certain geographies and profiles of businesses started to open up. We anticipate a part of the impact to continue for June as we restart the economy.
What are your thoughts on the COVID19 relief packages for MSMEs in India?
The relief package to the MSMEs certainly owns a lot of promise. It would be prudent to make sure the benefits of the package reach small businesses that were impacted the most.
Please help us understand what an SDG framework means? How does FTCash apply this framework to its business?
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals, were adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030. The 17 SDGs are integrated—that is, they recognize that action in one area will affect outcomes in others, and that development must balance social, economic and environmental sustainability.
FTcash is a member of UN Global Compact and also Goalkeepers by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation closely monitoring our progress against the goals 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth),9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) and 10 (Reduce Inequalities).
As the pandemic encourages business to move towards contactless payments, what does this mean for FTcash?
FTcash builds a customized credit score for the merchant which is leveraged to provide small businesses institutional finance and more importantly we recollect the money from their daily transactions on Point of Sale. As we progress forward in the journey of digitization, we are likely to see faster and cost effective collection of loans with minimal human intervention.
Financial institutions are now releasing emergency credit to MSMEs, what are some of the actions FTcash is taking as part of the stimulus measures?
FTcash was among the first few lenders in the country to start disbursals in the month of May. We continue to work with merchants to provide credit lines based on their business needs and top up loans as necessary. We had provided moratorium to all our merchants from March to May and have forwarded the same facility to several of our merchants who chose to opt for it for the month of June - August.
With Unlock1.0 here, how has the experience of working with your team remotely been?
Our remote working experience has been very encouraging so far. We have been able to operationalize our teams quickly to work remotely including our sales and collections team that are more used to being on the field.