Bangalore : Niro, a homegrown embedded consumer lending Fintech, today announced the appointment of collections veteran Narendran Prabhakaran, ex-Collections Head at Navi as Head of Collections and Operations, as it scales its business. With this announcement, Niro becomes one of the only startups to invest in such key capabilities and multidisciplinary leaders early on in their growth journey.  Niro brings Narendran on board to realize its vision of democratizing access to convenient and hassle-free embedded credit products for 600+ million internet users in India. Narendran P, who was Head of Collections at Navi and before that at MoneyTap, comes with 20+ years of experience across large financial services players and fintech, including 9 years at HDFC, 3 years at Bajaj Finance, 2 years at MoneyTap, and 1.5 years at Navi.

The company recently raised $3.5 Mn in a seed funding round led by Elevar Equity. The funding also saw participation from angel investors like Kunal Shah, Nitin Gupta, Bala Parthasarathy, the Patni Family Office, R. Ramaraj & Aseem Dhru.

On the appointment, Aditya Kumar, Co-Founder & CEO said, “We are at an exciting juncture in our journey where we are investing in key capabilities that take us closer to our vision. Narendran is a unique leader in the industry with collections experience across large banks and fintech, alike – and we are extremely excited to have him on board. As we grow, Narendran’s valuable expertise will help us in driving scale aggressively while building out world-class risk-management capabilities, realizing our vision of transforming all customer-facing digital platforms into fintechs.”

Narendran Prabhakaran, Head – Collections and Operations, Niro, said, “Having spent over 20 years of my career building large-scale collections capabilities, I am thrilled to join the founding leadership team at Niro.  Niro’s plans to scale aggressively in partnership with leading consumer internet platforms, while ensuring world-class risk-management capabilities resonated deeply with me.”

Before Navi, Narendran was the Collections Head at MoneyTap and prior to that was Regional Head – Collections at Bajaj Finserv and for 3 years. Prior to that, he spent almost a decade at HDFC Bank building collections teams across India. He has also worked with GE Money Bank, ICICI Bank, and GE Capital.