BharatPe forays into secured loans: Launches Gold loan for merchant partners

·         Aims to facilitate disbursals of Rs.500 crores by the end of 2022

·         Merchants can avail gold loans of upto INR 20 lacs

·         Lowest interest rate at 0.39% per month

Mumbai, March 14, 2022 (GNI): BharatPe, one of India’s fastest-growing Fintech companies, today announced the launch of Gold loan for its merchant partners. This marks the entry of BharatPe in the secured loans category. The company has partnered with RBI-approved NBFCs to offer gold loan of up to Rs. 20 lacs. BharatPe has already launched the Gold Loan offering for its merchants in Delhi NCR, Bangalore and Hyderabad and will be scaling this to 20 cities by the end of 2022. It has set a target of facilitating disbursals of Rs. 500 crores by the end of 2022.

An industry leader in Fintech segment, BharatPe is facilitating gold loan at an extremely competitive interest rate of 0.39% per month. The loan application process is fully digital and the loan is disbursed within 30 minutes of completion of the assessment process. Merchants can see the best offer for them and apply for a gold loan via the BharatPe app. The company is providing doorstep as well as branch collection facility, in partnership with NBFC partners. The merchants can take loans for a duration of 6, 9 and 12 months and have an option to repay the loan via Easy Daily Instalments (EDI). BharatPe will also be launching the EMI option for repayment shortly. The QR code-enabled product offering makes gold loan application easy, with minimal paperwork.

Speaking on the launch of gold loan, Mr. Suhail Sameer, CEO, BharatPe said, “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. 3000 crores to 3 lac merchant partners. With Gold loan, we have ventured into the big-ticket, secured loan category. Gold loan will enable us to further empower our merchant partners and positively impact millions of small businesses. We had conducted a pilot for the product for 2 months and the response has been very encouraging. We facilitated disbursals of Rs. 10 crores during the pilot phase. We are confident that with our lucrative gold loan product that is available at competitive interest rate, industry-best disbursal rate and with the option to pay via EDI, we will be able to facilitate gold loan disbursals of Rs. 500 crores by the end of the year.”

BharatPe has been facilitating unsecured loans of up to Rs. 7 lacs, to offline merchants and kirana store owners. The company offers collateral-free loans for 3/6 and 12-months duration. The loan application process is 100% digital and the merchants can pay via Easy Daily Instalments (EDIs). The company emerged as one of the largest B2B fintech lenders in the times of the pandemic in 2020. Recently, BharatPe announced that it has increased its network of POS business (BharatSwipe) by 25X to 250+ cities in the last 12 months. BharatPe has already deployed over 1.25 lakh BharatSwipe machines across offline shops. Achieving this rare feat in a short span of close to 1.5 years, BharatPe has scripted history as the fastest-ever scale-up on POS business in India, stated in the press release.

About BharatPe was founded in 2018 with the vision of making financial inclusion a reality for Indian merchants. In 2018, BharatPe launched India’s first UPI interoperable QR code, the first zero MDR payment acceptance service. In 2020, post-Covid, BharatPe also launched India’s only zero MDR card acceptance terminals – BharatSwipe. Currently serving over 80 lakh merchants across 150+ cities, the company is a leader in UPI offline transactions, processing 11 crores+ UPI transactions per month (annualized Transaction Processed Value of US$ 16+ Bn). The company has already facilitated disbursement of loans totalling to over ₹3000 crores to over 300,000 merchants, since launch. BharatPe’s POS business processes payments of over US$ 4 bn annually on its POS machines. It has a network of 1.25 lac+ machines across cities. BharatPe has raised over US$ 650 million in equity and debt, till date. The company’s list of marquee investors includes Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Steadview Capital, Beenext, Amplo and Sequoia Capital.  In June 2021, the company announced the acquisition of PAYBACK India, the country’s largest multi-brand loyalty program company with 100 million+ members. In June 2021, it was also given an in-principle approval by Reserve Bank of India to establish a Small Finance Bank, in partnership with Centrum Financial Services Limited (Centrum), the established and profitable NBFC arm of the Centrum Group. In October 2021, the consortium of Centrum Financial Services Limited (Centrum) and BharatPe, was issued a Small Finance Bank (SFB) license by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). BharatPe also made its grand entry in the Buy Now Pay Later segment with the launch of postpe in October 2021.