Drip Capital, a fintech providing trade finance , has set its sight on building a trade facilitation offering for small and medium businesses (SMBs) to help them in their cross border trade, its Co-founder and CEO Pushkar Mukewar has said.

“We are now looking to build a trade facilitation platform that would help solve certain pain points for SMBs in their cross border business. Some of the pain points for them are forex and insurance. We may also take partnership route to build this trade facilitation offering”, Mukewar told BusinessLine.

He said that the fintech expects this facilitation offering to go live next year. Mukewar also said that Drip Capital, which is present in three key markets of India, US and Mexico, is now eyeing in the next 12 months a two times growth in the average monthly business volumes of $150 million. While India would contribute a large part of this anticipated growth, Mukewar also sees increased contribution from the US and Mexico, where business is still in a nascent stage.

Set up in 2016, the company has two products — a bill discounting for exporters buy now pay later financing product for importers. Drip Capital does not participate in the domestic transactions.

Last September, Drip Capital had raised $175 million through a combination of equity and debt. This includes a $40 million in Series C capital raise and debt facilities from East West Bank. For the current year, it is not looking at any fresh capital raise. “ Focus this year is on execution”, he added.

Asked about banks upping their game in supporting cross border trade and the competition impact on Drip Capital, Mukewar said that he has not seen any material change as far as banks approach to small business in India are concerned, implying that SMBs still find it difficult to access working capital financing.

He said that Drip Capital is now in talks with several banks to see if the fintech could be a partner to them and solve for last mile issues. 

Asked about the impact of Covid-19 on business, Mukewar said that the fintech did cut on business, but has scaled up massively over the last 18 months.