Wishfin acquires FinTech startup Ladders

By Edil Corneille

Noida-based Wishfin, a lending FinTech marketplace, has acquired Ladders, a FinTech startup founded by Prakhar Aggarwal. Ladders was built to simplify the buying of mutual funds, investments, and insurance products and it deploys a unique customer experience flow to enable better decision making by the customer. Post-acquisition, the Ladders team, including Prakhar Aggarwal, will be joining Wishfin. Ladders has created a multi-stage user experience that integrates information in the journey. It simplifies complicated products like mutual funds and insurance. This helps customers make the right financial decisions.

“We have been looking at inorganic growth/acquisitions as a way to augment our product suite and business. We see a lot of interesting acquisition opportunities in the current market and were impressed by what Ladders has built. Our endeavour has always been to improve digital access to financial products. The team at Ladders, led by Prakhar, had built a unique user experience for accessing financial products. We plan to leverage the products build by the Ladders team and offer easy access to investment and insurance to millions of customers through our massive distribution pipe of 37 million customers of financial products, spread across India. We will also be using Ladders product for customer education initiatives as well, particularly in mutual funds and insurance,” said Puru Vashishtha, Chairman & MD, Wishfin.com.

Wishfin.com runs financial marketplaces, where consumers can buy various financial products such as loans, mutual funds, credit cards, etc. Wishfin.com has 37 million customers, and it is adding about 700, 000 customers every month. Wishfin has disbursed more than $3.5 billion worth of retail loans through its platform. Wishfin is said to have been the first FinTech to offer a free CIBIL score on Whatsapp in partnership with TransUnion CIBIL. Wishfin’s investors include Ram Shriram (an early investor in Google and founding Board Member of Google), Neeraj Arora (ex-Head of Business, Whatsapp) and Franklin Templeton.

Ladders was started by Prakhar Aggarwal, while he was still at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. Ladders aims to remove the clutter and streamline investing and insurance at its core.