Lendingkart appoints former Amazon Pay India CTO Manish Bhatia as technology head

Ahmedabad headquartered digital lending startup Lendingkart Technologies appointed Manish Bhatia as the president of technology, analytics and capabilities in the company. 

The appointment follows top-tier management changes at the company last year to improve its footprint as a non-banking finance company (NBFC), a statement said.

Even before the company’s co-founder and COO Mukul Sachan quit in September, Lendingkart had appointed Sudeep Bhatia as group CFO, Bratindra Sanyal as senior vice president of the human resource (HR) division and Deepesh Goel as the vice president of new initiatives and strategy. In October, it appointed Nagarajan S as its first chief risk officer.

At Lendingkart, Bhatia will be responsible for developing technology stack, risk management and data and analytics and improving customer acquisition and overall business growth. 

Prior to this, he was the CTO of Amazon Pay India and played a pivotal role in development for its India payments business. He has over 22 years of expertise in software development, incubating new services and developing critical digital products including companies such as FedEx and JP Morgan Chase. 

“With my experience, I aim to draw better insights from big and complex data sets and leverage innovative technology and digital platforms to enhance Lendingkart’s operations capability, customer and transaction growth rate and serve the financial requirements of our customers better,” Bhatia said. 

“We are pleased to welcome Manish Bhatia onboard to not only strengthen our internal teams but also help us become better equipped to fully serve the small and micro entrepreneurs of India,” Harshvardhan Lunia, co-founder and CEO of Lendingkart said.

Founded in 2014 by Harshvardhan Lunia and Sachan, the company provides short term working capital loans to small and medium enterprises  (SME) through Lendingkart Finance while  Lendingkart Technologies, another arm, handles technology and digital marketing based on big data analytics. 

Other than Ahmedabad, the company has offices in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi NCR and Kolkata. It claims to have disbursed over 100,000 loans to more than 89,000 SMEs. Lendingkart is backed by investors including Fullerton Financial Holding, Saama Capital, Mayfield India, Bertelsmann, Darrin Capital Management, Sistema Asia, India Quotient. 

In the financial year 2019-20, Lendingkart reported a 172% growth in its revenues to Rs 250 crore and net profit of Rs 3.2 crore.