CreditAccess Grameen Brand Guidelines: Grameen Koota, Bengaluru 1999 & a 2018 Listing

A book, a grant and a village outside Bengaluru.

CreditAccess Grameen traces its start to Vinatha M. Reddy, who, the company says, conceived it in December 1996 after reading Give Us Credit, the book by Alex Counts, president of Grameen Foundation USA. English Wikipedia dates the founding to 1999 and says Reddy, who was then running a non-governmental trust, obtained a grant from the Grameen Foundation to copy the Grameen model in India. The result was Grameen Koota.

The company says it adapted Grameen Bank’s group-lending method to Indian conditions and began work in Avalahalli, on the southern outskirts of Bengaluru, offering loans without collateral, along with other services, to women from low-income households in villages and towns. English Wikipedia says its customers are enrolled as members and organised in joint liability groups. The company explains its focus on women by saying that they tend to use resources productively and contribute to their families and communities.

In 2007 the lending business was moved from the NGO into a registered non-banking financial company, the company says, and English Wikipedia says it was renamed Grameen Financial Services Private Limited that year, with a further change of corporate name in March 2008. In 2013 the Reserve Bank of India reclassified it as an NBFC-MFI, a non-banking financial company specialising in microfinance, according to the company. Its earlier legal name was Grameen Koota Financial Services Private Limited, and Grameen Koota remains its operating brand, the company says; VCCircle also described it in August 2018 as a lender operating under the Grameen Koota brand.

Dutch owners, a listing and a merger.

The controlling owners came from Europe. VCCircle reported in August 2018 that the company was majority-owned by the Netherlands-based CreditAccess Asia NV, which had first backed the lender in 2008, and named the private equity firm Olympus Capital Holdings Asia among CreditAccess Asia’s key investors; English Wikipedia gives 2009 for the start of the investment. Today the company names CreditAccess India B.V., a Netherlands-based investment holding company, as its promoter and majority shareholder. It says that holding company has more than 250 shareholders, from European family offices and private investors to institutional and development finance investors, and also backs lenders in Indonesia and the Philippines.

The shares were listed on the National Stock Exchange and BSE in August 2018; English Wikipedia gives 23 August 2018. VCCircle reported a weak debut that day, with the shares opening below the offer price before recovering some losses, and described the company at the time as India’s second-largest microfinance institution, after Bharat Financial Inclusion. It was the 19th company to list on the main board that year, the same report said.

The next large step was an acquisition. On 27 November 2019 VCCircle reported that CreditAccess Grameen had signed definitive agreements to buy Madura Micro Finance in two steps: a controlling stake of up to 76.2 per cent from existing shareholders, then a merger of the two companies through a scheme of arrangement, with the Madura business run as a separate division until integration. The company’s investor pages list orders on the scheme of amalgamation from the National Company Law Tribunal in Chennai, dated October 2022, and in Bengaluru, dated February 2023.

Other partnerships followed, according to English Wikipedia: Citigroup worked with the company from September 2019 to finance women entrepreneurs in India, and in June 2023 CreditAccess Grameen signed a syndicated social loan facility, which the encyclopedia describes as the first in the Indian microfinance industry. Udaya Kumar Hebbar, chief executive from 2010 and managing director since 2016, handed the chief executive role to Ganesh Narayanan on 1 August 2023 while remaining managing director, English Wikipedia says.

Microfinance lenders and how they present themselves.

Microfinance lenders present themselves less through products than through method. Grameen Bank’s website opens on its line “A bank for the poor” and describes loans made without collateral, with all transactions except disbursement handled at village-level centres. ASA International sets out the “ASA Model” on a page of its own, from the size of a branch to the rhythm of weekly or fortnightly collections. For these institutions the method is the brand.

Their websites are built around networks and products. They publish branch, client and village counts as dated figures, offer branch locators, and list named loans for small businesses, crops, livestock, housing and education, alongside savings accounts, pension schemes and insurance. Newer pages describe digital wallets and digital financial services, sometimes launched market by market. Where a lender’s pages show small shops, farms or field officers at work, this guide describes them in words rather than reproducing them.

Documentation is a large part of the look. Lenders publish annual reports, monthly reports, governance pages and pages on social performance or impact, and listed groups add investor sections and regulatory news. Regulators are part of the picture too: in Bangladesh, the economist Mustafa K Mujeri wrote in The Daily Star in 2025, non-governmental lenders are licensed by the Microcredit Regulatory Authority, set up under an act of 2006. Claims about what microcredit achieves are the lenders’ own, or those of prize committees and researchers, and are contested in the research literature.

This guide reads each lender from its own pages and from dated outside sources: who founded it, how its lending works, and how its name is used. The palettes here — warm oranges, greens and blues — are our own unofficial interpretations, not the lenders’ published values, and no logo, photograph or document is reproduced.

Two names, one lender.

The lender’s products start with group loans. Its website lists an Income Generation Loan and a Home Improvement Loan under group lending, retail loans such as the Grameen Vikas Loan, and a customer app called Grameen Mahi. It sets out its guiding principles under the acronym CREATE — committed, reliable, empathetic, accountable, transparent and efficient — and gives its vision as becoming the preferred financial partner of Indian households lacking access to formal credit. The header of its website carries the line “Enabling rural transformation by igniting the spirit of enterprise,” and its media and investor pages hold a corporate brochure, newsletters and integrated annual reports alongside customer stories on its blog.

Its scale is reported by the company itself. As of 30 September 2026, it says, it worked in 16 states and one union territory through 2,326 branches, with more than 45 lakh customers, and it calls itself India’s largest NBFC-MFI. Among the awards it lists are a Platinum award in the women empowerment category at the Global ESG Awards 2026 and a bronze Asia-Pacific Stevie Award in 2025 for its FY2024 integrated annual report, in a category for innovation in annual reports.

For a design guide, CreditAccess Grameen shows a company carrying two names at once: a corporate name used on the stock exchanges and the Grameen Koota brand it operates under. Compare Grameen Bank, whose group-lending method the company says it adapted, and Ujjivan, another Bengaluru lender that began in microfinance. For this guide we use a field green, a marigold and a warm clay with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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