BharatPe will now offer gold loans for merchant partners

• BharatPe has launched gold loans for their merchants partners, marking its entry into the secured loans category.
• The company has partnered with RBI-approved NBFCs to offer gold loans up to ₹20 lakhs.
• The loan application process is fully digital and the loan is disbursed within 30 minutes of completion of the assessment process.

Merchants payments platform BharatPe has launched gold loans for their merchants partners, marking their entering in the secured loans category. The company was earlier working in the unsecured loans category by offering collateral free loans.

The company, led by chief executive officer (CEO) Suhail Sameer, has partnered with Reserve Bank of India (RBI)-approved non banking financial companies (NBFC) to offer gold loans up to ₹20 lakhs.

The company has already launched the gold loan offering in Delhi NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. It will now be looking to scale the products to 20 cities by the end of 2022. The company plans to facilitate disbursals of ₹500 crore by the end of 2022, at an 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, BharatPe said in a statement. The company also emphasised that the merchants can see the best offer for them and apply for the loan on their BharatPe app.

The company is providing both doorstep and branch collection services in partnership with the NBFC. The merchants can take loans for a duration of six, nine and 12 months. They also have an option to repay the loan via Easy Daily Instalments (EDI), and the company will be launching equated monthly instalment (EMI) payment shortly.

“Gold loans 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 ₹10 crores during the pilot phase,” Sameer said in a statement.

BharatPe was founded by Shashvat Nakrani and Bhavik Koladiya in 2018. Ashneer Grover, an angel investor in the company, came onboard as a cofounder. The company has facilitated unsecured loans, in partnership with NBFCs, worth ₹3,000 crores to three lakh merchant partners.

The company competes with Patym, Aye Finance and LendingKart in the merchant lending space.

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