Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi expands its footprint in India – its largest overseas market – with the launch of online lending services.
The firm will connect users with financiers, offering quick access to loans of up to 100,000 rupees ($1,400), Xiaomi’s India head Manu Jain said, according to a «Reuters» report. The online lending solution, «Mi Credit» rely on a partnership with five finance and fintech firms to audit the creditworthiness of customers and disburse loans.
Xiaomi first entered India’s financial sector in March with «Mi Pay» which enables bill payments and money transferals. The latest online lending launch marks another move to further expand in the market.
«For now India definitely is our biggest market outside China, not only in credit but pretty much in everything else,» said Feng Hong, Xiaomi co-founder and senior vice president. «We need to focus ourselves to make it really successful. We need to bring in more partners, bring more products, bring more users to make it really scale up. That's our focus for the next 12 months.»
Privacy Concerns
Xiaomi’s financial unit in Indonesia shut down in 2018 and a «Reuters» report said it was due to its banking partner’s decision to pull out over concerns about invasive data collection practices. Documents unveiled tracking of a wide array of activities and disclaimers which require users to agree to share a myriad of personal data including message and browser history.
During its launch, Xiaomi’s India head assured the public that data protection would be robust though the country has yet to establish law on the matter.
«We have strong data protection agreements with each of our partners that they cannot use this data for any other purpose, apart from giving loans to users,» Jain said, adding that data would be 100 percent encrypted.
