Ever heard of an EMI facility for dental treatments?

Dental treatments are not just painful but expensive as well. In fact, given a choice between a root canal and removing the tooth, a lot of people may choose the latter given the several sessions of unbearable pain and the extent of money involved in this treatment or for that matter any other dental procedure.

Funding dental treatments at times become very challenging as most health insurance plans do not provide any coverage in their schemes. However, there is a new option that can be availed now. An equated monthly installment (EMI) facility to be precise.

While Bajaj Finserve has been offering an easy EMI facility with Lifecare Finance, across 400 cities and 2,700 partner clinics and hospitals but it's restricted to their EMI network. Similarly, dental clinic chain Sabkadentist has partnered with players like Bajaj Finserv, Capital Float and Snapmint EMI network to offer premium plans varying from three, six, nine, to 12 months of EMI payments.

A recent entrant in this space is Aditya Birla Finance Ltd (ABFL) that has partnered the Indian Dental Association (IDA) for an easy EMI facility to make dental treatments more accessible and convenient in the country. The initiative was made public at the recently concluded 11th World Dental Show 2019 in Mumbai. The easy EMI facility will have options starting at 0% interest. ABFL is the lending subsidiary of Aditya Birla Capital Ltd.

Rakesh Singh, managing director and chief executive officer, Aditya Birla Finance Ltd (ABFL), said, the scheme will provide customers with great value in the form of hassle-free credit with easy installments for their dental treatments. “It will be a seamless, fast and convenient transaction which is a win-win for both doctors and patients,” he said.

Rakesh Singh, MD & CEO, ABFL

The EMI facility is aimed at helping dentists with flexible monthly payment options thereby enabling patients to take avail dental treatments by making dental financing accessible, cashless, and convenient. Currently the programme pilot has been launched in Mumbai and Delhi with limited IDA dentist members and will be implemented Pan India in a phased manner.

Dr. Ashok Dhoble, secretary general, Indian Dental Association, said, easy EMI facility for dental treatments is an important step in facilitating and boosting the dental practice in India. “A much-needed service, this will ease the patients in terms of easy financing options on EMI basis. This facility is indeed a need of the hour to encourage people to willingly undertake oral treatment. Gearing-up on similar lines as in some of the developed countries,” he said.

Seeing early signs of declining trends in rural growth being arrested, says Nielsen's Sunil Khiani

While rural slowdown was seen impacting growth for the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies in the June quarter of fiscal 2020, the situation has only become worse in the September quarter that's showing significant stress in the rural markets.
Earlier this week FMCG market leader Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), which reported domestic consumer growth of 7% on year and underlying volume growth of 5% on year, said that rural growth was 0.5 times that of urban. This basically meant that rural, that was growing at par with urban in the April to June quarter of fiscal 2020, has slowed down further and was now growing at half of urban rate.
According to Sanjiv Mehta, chairman and managing director, HUL, the near term demand outlook, especially in rural India, remains challenging.
A recent Nielsen report, however, makes it very evident that while companies are taking a very conservative view on the rural slowdown, the ground scenario there is way beyond the estimates. In fact, Nielsen did not shy away from making it very clear that 'for the first time in the last seven years, rural growth has dropped below urban'.

Rural is growing at 5% in Q3’19, which is 1/4th as compared to 20% in Q3’18, while Urban is growing at 8% as against 14% growth in Q3’18. The report further said that rural India that contributes 36% to overall FMCG spends has historically been growing around 3-5% points faster than urban. This has been on account of increasing affordability, availability and conversion of commodity to branding resulting in higher demand. However in recent periods, rural growth is slowing down at a much faster rate compared to urban. 
The report said, growth in Q3’19 sales per store in rural areas has become 1/4th versus Q3’18, which reflects a significant drop in demand amongst rural consumers. In addition, rural distribution growth has continued to inch downwards. Small manufacturers have seen the biggest drop in cumulative distribution growth where it has moved from 18% in Q3’18 to no growth in Q3’19, while for large manufacturers cumulative distribution growth has halved.
Small players that account for nearly 1/3rd of the sales in rural India through better value for money offerings now grow at a similar rate versus large manufacturers. This is in contrast to Q3'18 which was an inflection point for the growth rates of small and large manufacturers.
The growth rate for small manufacturers has slumped by 23%. Small player exits have increased by 33% and new entrants in the market have fallen owing to strong inflationary pressures and increasing input prices. 

There are early signs of the current declining trends getting arrested, according to Sunil Khiani, head – retail measurement service, Nielsen South Asia, as far as outlook for the second half of fiscal 2020 is concerned. "FMCG growth for Q3 2019 stands at 7.6% as against a prediction of 7% to 8% range. This is so far in line with our forecast. With the growth in the e-commerce sector the year end forecast for all India FMCG continues to be in the 9% to 10% range. While we expect Q4 2019 to be in the 6.5% to 7.5% range, we are now finally seeing early signs of the declining trends being arrested. The growth forecast for Q1 2020 (Jan-Mar 2020) stands in the range of 7.5% - 8.5%," Khiani said in the report.