Credit and Finance for MSMEs: BharatPe has partnered with the RBI-approved non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) to facilitate up to Rs 20 lakh gold loan at an ‘extremely competitive’ interest rate of 0.39 per cent per month, the company said.
Credit and Finance for MSMEs: Digital payments company BharatPe on Monday announced its foray into the secured loans segment for its merchant partners. The company said it would aim to disburse Rs 500 crore in gold loan to merchants by the end of 2022. BharatPe has partnered with the RBI-approved non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) to facilitate up to Rs 20 lakh gold loan at an ‘extremely competitive’ interest rate of 0.39 per cent per month, according to a company statement. The offering is already available for its merchants in Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad and would be scaled up to 20 cities by the end of 2022.
“Credit gap is one of the biggest roadblocks in the growth journey of offline retailers. Over the last couple of years, we have been aggressively focussing on solving this by facilitating unsecured loans in partnership with NBFCs. We have been able to facilitate disbursals of over Rs 3,000 crores to 3 lakh merchant partners. With the gold loan, we have ventured into the big-ticket, secured loan category,” said Suhail Sameer, CEO, BharatPe.
The company, which competes with Paytm, Google Pay, PhonePe, and others, had conducted a two-month pilot for the secured loan product before the launch and facilitated disbursals of Rs 10 crores during the phase, Sameer said. The company claimed gold loan disbursement time to be within 30 minutes of completion of the assessment process. The merchants can take loans for six, nine, or 12-month periods with repayment through Easy Daily Instalments (EDI). BharatPe would also launch the EMI option for repayment shortly.
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So far, the company has been enabling unsecured credit of up to Rs 7 lakh to offline merchants and kirana store owners for three, six and 12-month duration. Recently, BharatPe had announced that it has increased its network of POS business (BharatSwipe) by 25X to over 250 cities in the last 12 months. BharatPe said it has already deployed over 1.25 lakh BharatSwipe machines across offline shops.
BharatPe was co-founded by Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani in 2018 to offer India’s first UPI interoperable QR code. In June 2021, it was given in-principle approval by RBI to establish a Small Finance Bank, in partnership with Centrum Financial Services Limited (Centrum), the NBFC arm of the Centrum Group. BharatPe also entered the Buy Now Pay Later segment with the launch of postpe in October 2021. So far, more than $650 million has been raised in equity and debt by the company from Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital, and others.