Credit and finance for MSMEs: Founded in 2018, merchant payments app BharatPe launched India’s first UPI interoperable QR code and zero MDR (merchant discount rate) payment acceptance service. It currently serves merchants across more than 400 cities and has a significant presence in UPI offline transactions, processing over 18 crores monthly transactions. The company has already facilitated the disbursement of loans of around Rs 8,500 till early last month to more than 4.5 lakh merchants. The company has raised more than $650 million in equity so far from Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, Beenext, Sequoia Capital, and more.
Talking to FE Aspire at the ScaleUp Summit 2022 organised in December last year, Dhruv Dhanraj Bahl, responsible for scaling up the merchant lending vertical at BharatPe as the Head of Merchant Lending highlighted the company’s merchant growth.
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“Currently we are at about 10 million merchants, 30-40 per cent of which are active per month, working on any of our products related to payments, lending, and deposits. We work with various NBFCs to facilitate capital for our merchants who accept payments using UPI. We use that data to do proxy underwriting and give suggestions to our NBFC partners who then decide and disburse loans to these merchants. With our partners we have around $400 million worth of assets under management with regards to our merchant programmes,” said Bahl.
He explained more about how the company leverages data to enable credit to merchants and expand beyond urban and semi-urban areas.
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