The dead asset on every SME's books

Manish Kumar's claim is that Indian SMEs are less short of credit than short of a way to sell what they already own. An accepted invoice is a receivable — a dead asset sitting on the books while a large buyer takes 60 or 90 days to pay — and because that same invoice is a liability on the buyer's books, selling it transfers a blue-chip's credit quality rather than the small supplier's. That arbitrage is what turns invoice discounting into an asset class instead of a loan, and it is why KredX went to family offices, treasuries and HNIs before it went to banks: retail capital is the hard side to build, and once bankers had their own money on the platform they became the champions who brought their institutions in. Factoring itself is more than a century old; the contrarian bet was that it could be done without the relationship, the location and the emotion — on data alone. Devang Mundra's half of the argument is that there was nothing to copy, so the first product was a digital experience stitched out of DocuSign and Google Sheets while the real stack got built, and the underwriting had to read the seller, the buyer, the relationship and the macro at once — a lesson learned expensively when an externally AA-rated anchor defaulted in the IL&FS year and took its single-customer supplier down with it. The wider stakes sit outside the company: banks will not touch anything below AA, SME-to-SME credit still cannot prove a transaction isn't phony, and until contracts are reliably enforceable, foreign money stays away and the cost of financing stays high.