BharatPe launches gold loan for merchant partners

By Leandra Monteiro

BharatPe, one of India’s fastest-growing FinTech companies, 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 INR 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 INR 500 crores by the end of 2022.

BharatPe is facilitating gold loans 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 facilities, 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 applications easy, with minimal paperwork.

Speaking on the launch of gold loan, 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 INR 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).