Here’s how Google India is unlocking economic opportunities with digital credit

By Puja Sharma

Google for India 2023: Elevating product experiences through leading-edge AI and deep local partnerships

Enabling digital credit

Google India is planning to enhance its products in India, particularly in the realm of digital payments, which have successfully integrated millions of Indians into the formal economy over the past six years. During the last year alone, the value processed through the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) reached a remarkable ₹167 lakh crores. With interoperability as its fundamental principle, UPI has instigated a transformative change at a population scale in the way people make payments.

With India being home to the world’s largest youth population, the Google’s digital payments infrastructure presents a unique opportunity to help address another key area – accessing responsible credit responsibly. From paying for a device toward a child’s education, to accessing funds for kick starting a home business, quick access to responsible credit can help millions turn their life around. Where only 1 in 5 credit eligible users in India currently get access to formal credit, many have no recourse but to turn to informal lenders and often get mired by exorbitant interest rates.

Responsible credit is the solution, but only a small section of people in India can get formal credit as it requires a high threshold income and cumbersome paperwork. This excludes millions of eligible but underserved Indians with lower incomes and fewer assets from the economic opportunities that unlock with formal credit.

Just like UPI revolutionized digital payments, digitizing credit – with consent and privacy safeguards – can provide ways of expanding the reach of formal credit. And the lower transaction cost of digital credit delivery can enable smaller minimum ticket loan sizes, making it more suitable and approachable for more borrowers.

Working with our partners in the financial ecosystem, we are proud to announce products – tailored for consumers and merchants – to help address both the organized and unorganized sector.

Merchant offerings

Merchant credit line, powered by ePayLater

Google Pay is enabling a credit line for merchants in partnership with ePayLater. This product will help solve the working capital requirements of merchants. Merchants can use this line across all online and offline distributors to buy their stock and supplies and grow their business.

Sachet Loans, powered by DMI Finance

Merchants often require smaller ticket loans and simpler repayment options. To address this, Google Pay is enabling on its platform, sachet loans in collaboration with DMI Finance. These start as low as ₹15000, and can be repaid with easy repayment options starting at just ₹111. This offering is aimed at bringing ease and convenience to SMBs.

Expanding the portfolio of merchant loans

On the merchant side, we are happy to announce our new partnership with ICICI Bank & seamless repeat loans powered by Indifi.

Consumer offerings

Expanding the portfolio of personal loans on Google Pay with Axis Bank

Personal loans have been available on Google Pay for the last few years in collaboration with its partner DMI Finance. This portfolio is expanding with Axis Bank making its personal loans available on Google Pay, with more partners to follow shortly.

Credit on UPI

Earlier this year, Google Pay added the facility to add Rupay credit cards to the app, and using them to seamlessly make payments via UPI. Extending this functionality further, in collaboration with its PSP ICICI Bank, users can now avail credit lines from banks on UPI, and use it to make payments via Google Pay in the same way that they would with a UPI payment.

Core to our approach to building products, these features have been built on a bedrock of responsibility, with data privacy, security, consent, and control underpinning all of these offerings.