A former co-CEO of Germany's largest bank is heading for India's non-bank finance sector to tap demand in a country where millions of people do not have ready access to banking, a report said.

A former co-chief executive at Deutsche Bank, Anshu Jain, is partnering with former colleague Bhupinder Singh to launch a non-bank finance company in India, tapping into a market where millions of people are not covered by banks, according to the Economic Times (of India).

The venture will lend to individuals, small- and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs, and could be modelled on San Francisco-based fintech startup SoFi, to which Jain is an advisor, the publication reported, citing unnamed sources. The business may be financially supported by SoftBank, it said.

Jain left the German lender in June last year at a time when the Frankfurt-listed bank was going through a period of management upheaval as well as battling to recover from falling profits and the impact of legal costs linked to affairs such as alleged rigging of financial market benchmarks. In February, the German regulator concluded audits at the bank, which in effect cleared Jain of wrongdoing.