Reinventing Dealer Financing in India’s Oil & Gas Sector: How an Industry Transformed Working Capital at the Last Mile

India’s Oil & Gas industry is a national engine, powering everything from transport and logistics to agriculture and urban mobility. But while headlines often focus on crude prices and refinery outputs, there’s another critical layer keeping this engine running, The Dealers.

Across highways and hinterlands, fuel dealers act as the last-mile distributors of petrol, diesel, and lubricants. Yet despite their crucial role, many of these businesses face persistent, often invisible, financing challenges. With pre-shipment payment obligations, rigid regulatory cycles, and limited access to formal credit, the financial health of dealers has long been a weak link in an otherwise robust sector.

The Industry Challenge? A Capital Crunch at the Last Mile. 

Despite generating annual revenues between $1Mn to 5Mn, most dealers struggled to access timely credit due to:

• Upfront pre-shipment payment demands, placing pressure on liquidity
• Short credit cycles (7–15 days) that rarely aligned with cash flow realities
• Delayed payments and regulatory hold-ups, pushing dealers toward informal or high-cost lending
• Limited digital infrastructure, especially in semi-urban or rural areas, making access to formal financing cumbersome or non-existent

This liquidity mismatch not only increased operational risk for dealers but also exposed fuel companies to supply chain volatility.

The Opportunity? Reimagine Dealer Financing as a sector-wide Solution.

Recognizing the need for structural change, leading Oil & Gas players engaged with Vayana to build a scalable, plug-and-play Dealer Financing ecosystem. The vision was to:

• Empower dealers with faster, easier access to working capital
• Reduce friction in order placement and payment
• Provide anchors with visibility and control without adding compliance burden
• Create a template that could work across multiple companies and geographies

Vayana enabled Financing at the Speed of Fuel Demand

Vayana builds and deploys a cloud-native, API-driven solution tailored to the operational realities of Oil & Gas Dealers. Here’s how it works: 

1. Pre-shipment Financing

Dealers can access funds before fuel dispatch. Thus, eliminating cash-flow bottlenecks and reducing dependency on personal or informal sources of credit.

2. Extended Repayment Terms

Payment windows are restructured to match fuel sales cycles. Thereby helping dealers breathe easier in managing operations without daily cash pressure.

3. Multi-lender Architecture

With multiple banks integrated on the platform, dealers can choose from a panel of lenders, ensuring competitive rates and high coverage.

4. Mobile-first Experience

A two-click mobile interface allows dealers to place orders and get financing in real time without needing to navigate complex banking systems.

5. Real-time Transparency

Anchors and financiers have 360° visibility into disbursements, repayments, and program utilization, reducing risk and simplifying compliance.

6. Rapid Onboarding via Vayana network rollout

Hundreds of dealers onboarded quickly, using Vayana’s existing infrastructure, eliminating friction and ensuring high adoption rates.

The Impact? Financing Liquidity at Scale

Since its launch, the program delivers tangible, measurable outcomes across the Oil & Gas sector:

• 750+ dealers onboarded and actively financed
• $ 135 Mn + disbursed across programs
• 70 %+ utilization rate, indicating strong dealer trust and recurring usage
• 5 to 7 minutes for financing disbursal, thanks to real-time decisioning and API integration
• 5 major Oil & Gas companies, both government-owned and private, successfully running live programs

The platform has not only helped keep pumps operational, rather has enabled dealers to grow, reinvest, and reduce reliance on costly or risky funding sources.

Dealer financing in the Oil & Gas sector has historically been fragmented, manual, and underserved. Through its technology-first, credit-inclusive approach, Vayana has helped reshape how India’s energy sector thinks about working capital—turning what was once a pain point into a competitive advantage.

By providing seamless credit access, improving dealer stickiness, and ensuring operational continuity, Vayana’s Dealer Financing Program is now setting the benchmark for last-mile financing in regulated industries.

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