Market-size charts are easy to argue with. A named institution entering the category this quarter is not.
In July 2026, industry coverage reported that Karnataka Bank had partnered with CredAble to launch its first fully-digital supply-chain-finance platform. Whatever the eventual scale, it is a concrete, dated data point about direction: banks are actively building supply-chain-finance capability, not just talking about it.
The gap that pulls them in
The pull is structural. India factoring sits at roughly 1% of GDP (FCI, 2024) against an EU average near 11% (EU Federation, 2024) — a wide penetration gap, and a published cross-market benchmark rather than anyone's forecast. Against an addressable MSME credit gap the RBI Expert Committee put at ₹20–25 lakh crore, the appetite is obvious and the rails increasingly exist.
Eligibility is no longer the binding constraint either. The Factoring Regulation (Amendment) Act 2021 made thousands of NBFCs eligible to factor, and TReDS provides authorised venues. Permission is broad; penetration is still thin.
So what is actually binding?
The cost and trustworthiness of verifying the underlying trade. A receivable is only financeable if the trade is real, the counterparties are who they claim to be, the receivable is unique, and it has not quietly been financed somewhere else. Each of those checks, done manually on a small-ticket deal, can cost more than the deal earns — which is precisely why good MSME suppliers below the approved-anchor line go unfunded.
And as more lenders enter, a new risk grows with them: the same receivable financed on one rail and pledged bilaterally on another, invisible to each rail on its own. On-exchange duplication is already handled within a venue; the unsolved case is across venues and off-exchange, where no single participant can see the whole picture.
Why a neutral verification layer, now
This is the moment a neutral evidence layer earns its place. Not a lender, not a marketplace, not a participant in any transaction — precisely so it can be the verifier the rails and financiers structurally cannot be for one another. It scores the trade on tiered evidence, checks a receivable's fingerprint before financing across rails, and returns signals and evidence a credit team can act on — while every credit decision stays with the lender.
AssureLocker is pre-revenue and at design-partner stage, with no claim of a live deployment or regulatory endorsement. But the timing argument is not ours to inflate: the banks are arriving, and the layer that makes each deal cheap and safe to verify is what turns their appetite into funded receivables.
See how it works: AssureSCF, or book a walkthrough.