The OCEN Promise

The worst kept secret in India is the immense potential of the Medium and Small Scale Enterprise (MSME) as a force multiplier in the Indian economy.
Not without reason. This sector accounts for a fifth of the employment in India and a third of the country’s gross domestic product. And, yet it is nowhere close to realizing its potential.
And this is largely because they have been denied access to working capital from institutions. Since Independence various regimes have sought to resolve this. All of them failed.
Now, there is hope. OCEN or the Open Credit Enablement Network, another digital public good (DPG), promises to reset the business of lending to MSMEs by leveraging their commercial data to de-risk. How will OCEN do this? And why would it succeed where other attempts have failed.
To answer this we spoke to Sharad Sharma, tech evangelist and co-founder of iSpirt—the Bangalore-based group of technologists who have powered game-changing DPGs like Aadhaar and UPI.