HT Bureau
GUWAHATI, Aug 30: Meta hosted the second edition of the Grow Your Business Summit, its annual event dedicated to the growth agenda of small businesses in India, and announced new working capital support and enhanced service support features for all advertisers in the country. Further, Meta announced a new financial support feature to ease cash flow for small businesses in India – No Cost EMI. Notably, India is the first country within Meta where No Cost EMI has been launched.
This feature will allow advertisers to pay Meta for their advertising campaigns in easy, equated monthly installments over 3 months through participating banks at no additional cost of interest to them. Meta will bear the applicable interest payable to the bank and give it as an upfront discount to the business on its ad spending. Working capital access is a concern for many new and growing businesses in the country.
Said Ajit Mohan, VP and MD (Facebook India) Meta, “With these announcements, every advertiser on Meta in India, irrespective of their ad spends, has access to financial and service support, at the click of a button to unlock new growth opportunities. We know that each business is on a distinct journey, and we are committed to building India-focused solutions keeping in mind their unique needs. We hope that the initiatives that we have announced during Grow Your Business Summit will help small businesses achieve their business goals with greater flexibility and ease.”
In 2021, Meta launched the Small Business Loans Initiative, a program that enables business loans for Meta’s small business advertisers through third-party lending platforms. This too was an India-first initiative within Meta. At the Grow Your Business Summit, it was announced that the scope of this program has now expanded to 19000+ pin codes across India, which is almost the entire length and breadth of the country. This means that Meta advertisers from even the smallest towns and villages can now apply for collateral-free business loans from as little as Rs 30000 to as much as Rs 1 crore.