Fintech unicorn BharatPe has launched gold loan for its merchant partners, marking the company’s entry in the secured loans category.
The company has partnered with RBI-approved NBFCs to offer gold loan of up to ₹20 lakh. BharatPe has already launched the gold loan offering for its merchants in Delhi NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad and will be scaling this to 20 cities by this year-end. The company has set a target of facilitating disbursals of ₹500 crore by the year-end.
EMI option on the cards
BharatPe is facilitating gold loan at a monthly interest rate of 0.39 per cent. The loan application process is digital and the loan is said to be disbursed within 30 minutes of completion of the assessment process. The merchants can take loans for a duration of 6, 9 and 12 months and have an option to repay the loan through easy daily instalments (EDI). BharatPe also plans to launch the EMI option for repayment.
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 ₹3,000 crore to ₹3 lakh 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 ₹10 crore 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 ₹500 crore by the end of the year.”
BharatPe has been facilitating unsecured loans of up to ₹7 lakh, to offline merchants and kirana store owners. The company offers collateral-free loans for 3, 6 and 12-months duration. Recently, BharatPe announced that it has increased its network of POS business (BharatSwipe) by 25x to over 250 cities in the last 12 months. BharatPe has already deployed over 1.25 lakh BharatSwipe machines across offline shops.