Logistics giant, LetsTransport, enables credit on its platform by leveraging FinBox Embedded Finance Platform

Leveraging Embedded Finance gives you a strong return on investment no matter what industry your business is aligned to. All digital platforms need to constantly work to improve their product offering, increase customer retention, increase customer lifetime value, differentiate themselves from competitors, increase their customer acquisition, monetize their customer base, and upgrade the user experience. Embedded Finance helps platforms achieve each one of these.

Here’s an interesting story about how LetsTransport, a series B funded logistics company, achieved the same by leveraging Embedded Finance.

Background

Logistics and inland shipping in India is a highly unorganised sector. There is no monitoring of trucks, little to no transparency of operations, inefficient communication, and most significantly, a highly unpredictable demand trend. These challenges pose problems for both, enterprises that require logistical services and truckers that fulfill these requirements.

LetsTransport is a logistics platform that aggregates trucks and provides a marketplace for enterprises with logistical needs and truckers. It also helps in tracking and monitoring trucks to ensure on-time delivery for their partners. It facilitates the smooth collaboration of truck drivers and enterprises, facilitating their growth. LetsTransport is at the forefront of streamlining the logistics sector. It has become India’s fastest growing logistics aggregation company and has onboarded over 60,000 trucks in less than 5 years.

The Challenge

Letstransport is well positioned to solve the larger problems in the logistics industry. It has a strong competence in tech and operations - both crucial ingredients. However, there is one more important piece of the puzzle to make the logistics value chain more efficient - and that is financial services.

Independent truckers receive highly fluctuating demand. For example, truckers working for FMCG companies typically receive jobs over weekends, and are left without jobs on weekdays. On the flip side, truckers working for other industries like e-commerce, carry out deliveries throughout the week, but don’t get any business on weekends. When truckers can’t find jobs at a regular frequency, it becomes impossible for them to maintain cash flow and plan out their business. In such conditions, easy to acquire credit can drastically improve ease of doing business.

Truckers need credit for crucial operations such as fuel financing, vehicle maintenance, vehicle insurance or buying new vehicles. The problem is that they have limited access to financing options. Due to the unorganized and informal nature of the sector, credit is hard to acquire. Formal sources don’t lend to truckers, and loans from the informal sector are expensive and the terms are prohibitive. In addition, the loan application process is clunky and time consuming, and truckers are unable to acquire credit at the right time.

The lack of smooth enablement of credit was a major point of friction in the logistics value chain.

Lack of credit most definitely impacted the truckers, enterprises, as well as LetsTransport. The company risked the following things.

The Solution

At this point, LetsTransport had confirmed that enabling credit on their platform through alternate methods was crucial to their own growth and that of the logistics sector.

However, enabling credit requires navigating through a complex maze of finance, technology, heavy regulations, and customer behavior. This process can take anything between months and a year to come to fruition. It also adds a lot of financial overhead and requires heavy maintenance.