BharatPe launches the ‘BharatPe Lagao, World Cup Jao’

 BharatPe launches the ‘BharatPe Lagao, World Cup Jao’ contest for its merchant partners

                        Chance to win an all-expenses paid trip to watch India play at
                                                        ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021
                                    Plans to reward 400 merchants across 140+ cities 

Keeping up with its endeavour to empower small merchants, BharatPe, India’s leading fintech Company for merchants, has rolled out an innovative contest for its merchant partners called ‘BharatPe Lagao, World Cup Jao’. As a part of the initiative, BharatPe is giving its BharatPe QR merchants, an opportunity to enjoy a 2-days, all-expenses paid trip to Dubai and cheer for India at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2021. The company plans to reward its 400 top transacting merchants across the country, as a part of this initiative. The contest will be live across 140+ cities where BharatPe has a presence in India. The contest ends on September 30, 2021.

The ‘BharatPe Lagao, World Cup Jao’ contest includes three milestones based on number of transactions or TPV on the BharatPe QR. Merchants can reach Milestone 1 when they complete 50 transactions or do transactions worth Rs. 25,000, Milestone 2 when they complete 150 transactions or record Rs. 75,000 in TPV and Milestone 3 when they complete 250 transactions or clock Rs. 125,000 in TPV. Scratch cards can be availed at each milestone and the merchants can earn assured runs of upto 1000.. The merchants who complete Milestone 3 can get an all-inclusive package to Dubai to watch India play the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup. The winners of the contest will be decided via a lucky draw and announced in the first week of October 2021. Additionally, merchants can redeem runs for exciting rewards/ BharatPe merchandise including an autographed miniature bat, an autographed full-size bat, a free size cap, cricket jersey, leather cricket ball, instant discount on recharges/ bill payments and get a chance to meet their favorite cricket stars. 

Speaking about the campaign, Mr. Nishant Jain, Chief Business Officer, BharatPe, said, “Merchants are at the core of everything we do. We are committed to our vision of empowering small merchants and kirana store owners with best-in-class fintech products that can aid the growth of their businesses. We roll out innovative campaigns from time to time to reward our top transacting merchants and further nurture our relationship with them. Earlier this year, we had rewarded 673 top transacting merchants across 10 emerging cities, in the 3- month long Festive Bonanza contest. Now, as businesses get ready for the upcoming festive season, we wanted to give our top performing merchants a chance to watch India play live at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup in the UAE. We understand that cricket is one of the most popular sport in the country and ‘BharatPe Lagao, World Cup Jao’ is designed to reward our top merchants with trip to Dubai. We are confident that this contest will enable us to further enhance our merchant engagements. We hope to touch atleast 5 million merchants with this initiative. We will be rolling out more innovative contests to empower and applaud our 7.5 million merchant partners in the times to come.”

Currently, the contest is live across tier-1, 2 and 3 cities in India, including metro cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai; as well as emerging cities like Pune, Jaipur, Bhopal, Indore, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad etc. Also, it is live in cities like Visakhapatnam, Vadodara, Warangal, Nagpur, Allahabad, Kanpur, Vijayawada, Aurangabad, Varanasi, Nashik, Dehradun, Kochi, Mangalore, Mysore, Agra, Ludhiana, Meerut, Surat, Jalandhar, Gorakhpur, Patna, Guwahati, Trivandrum, Bhubaneswar, Coimbatore and Madurai.

BharatPe has witnessed a phenomenal growth over the last fiscal year, with the company witnessing a 5x growth in payments and a 10x growth in lending business. Scripting a new chapter in the country’s Digital India story, BharatPe has been rapidly expanding beyond metros, intending to empower merchants in Bharat with its safe and secure digital payment infrastructure as well as its credit offerings. Recently, BharatPe forayed into the unicorn club with Series E fund raise of US$ 370 mn at a valuation of US$ 2.85 bn. BharatPe is now amongst the Top 5 most valued Fintech startups in India, and has one of the strongest cap tables for any start-up in India.

BharatPe partners with Axis Bank for

BharatPe partners with Axis Bank for its POS business

 ·         Strategic alliance aimed at ensuring better experience for BharatPe’s POS merchants

BharatPe, India’s leading fintech company for merchants, today announced a strategic alliance with Axis Bank, the third largest private sector bank in India. As a part of the association, Axis Bank will be the acquiring bank for BharatPe’s POS business (BharatSwipe) and will empower acceptance of credit and debit card payments for BharatPe’s merchants using BharatSwipe.

This association will help BharatPe enhance the merchant experience by leveraging best-in-class technology platform offered by Axis Bank. The merchants can enjoy faster payment processing, a more secured and simplified platform, along with a host of other features.

Axis Bank today is the third largest POS acquiring bank in the payments acceptance business in India. With an Installed Base of over 6,52,026 POS terminals spread across India in metro, urban, rural and even deep geo cities such as Barmer, Ratlam, Korba etc, serving both big and small merchants, the Bank currently processes around   Rs.19,000 Cr of volumes per month. With superior technological capabilities for faster and secure payment processing, Axis Bank is in a position to serve all partners and customers to leverage the same for accepting payments through multiple payment modes.  

BharatPe launched its POS machine, BharatSwipe, last year as India’s first zero rental and zero MDR POS machine. It received an overwhelming response from small merchants and kirana store owners. The BharatSwipe business has scaled up rapidly, and now contributes 20% to the overall payments Transaction Processed Value (TPV) of the company. BharatPe has an installed base of over 1 lac POS machines across 16 cities in the country and facilitates transactions of over Rs. 1400 crores every month. BharatPe clocked annualized transaction value of US$2bn on the POS terminals at the end of FY21 and has set a target of US$6 bn in annualized TPV by the end of FY22.

Commenting on the partnership, Sanjeev Moghe, EVP & Head- Cards & Payments, Axis Bank said, “We have been continuously working on partnership led models & digital solutions to expand our offerings to the merchant community. In this endeavour, we are delighted to partner with BharatPe, one of the fastest growing fintech brands in the country. This partnership aids our commitment to drive digital adoption across the ecosystem and achieve the goal of financial inclusion by bringing technological access for digital payments to all segments of the society. Further, we look forward to partnering with other fintechs and e-commerce players to help them ensure merchant stickiness on their QR code installations by providing co-branded POS plus QR and several other value added services”

Speaking on the association, Suhail Sameer, Chief Executive Officer, BharatPe said, “We have witnessed phenomenal growth in our POS business since its launch. We have set aggressive plans for the vertical and aim to enable 5 crore transactions and scale the POS business by 3x in the next 12 months. We are targeting tripling our POS deployment to 3 lac machines by the end of current fiscal. We are also looking at expanding our reach by 5x to 80 cities in the country.  We are also working towards rolling out customer credit offerings as well as add loyalty and rewards features to our POS devices in the coming months. In order to achieve these, we will be exploring partnerships with banking and financial institutions that can empower our offering. We believe that Axis Bank is amongst the ‘digitally- ahead’ banks in the country and we are confident that this partnership will be not only help us deliver a seamless offering to our merchants, but also be instrumental in our journey to achieve the next level of growth. We look forward to a more holistic association with them in the times to come.”

BharatSwipe also allows merchants to accept QR payments, via dynamic QR generated on the Swipe machine. Also, its feature of generating physical receipts for QR payments is one of the most sought after feature. The company has also recently launched ‘holiday settlements’ feature for its merchant partners. This feature allows merchants to accept settlements even on a bank holiday, thereby ensuring liquidity at all times.

BharatPe is India’s largest fintech company that offers a range of financial technology products for SMEs, small merchants and kirana store owners. It has been committed to drive financial inclusion in the country with India’s first UPI QR payment acceptance product with zero transaction fees, a range of loans for the underserved and the unexplored merchants as well as SMEs, and zero rental card acceptance machines. It will continue to scale its lending and payments business as well as expand its presence to newer markets in FY22. The company aspires to become a Digital Bank for all SMEs in the country.  It has set a target of reaching US$30 billion TPV annually on payments (both QR and Swipe) and building a loan book of $700 million with small merchants by March 2023.

 

BharatPe appoints Parth Joshi as

 BharatPe appoints Parth Joshi as Chief Marketing Officer

·         Ex Reckitt and GSK executive joins the leadership team at BharatPe

 

BharatPe, India’s leading financial services company for merchants, today announced the appointment of Parth Joshi as the Chief Marketing Officer at BharatPe. Parth, a global marketing leader, has extensive experience in building brands, across India and overseas markets. 

Parth Joshi will work closely with Suhail Sameer, BharatePe’s Group President. This is the fourth key leadership appointment by BharatPe this year. The company has already announced the appointment of Gautam Kaushik (ex-MD & CEO, PAYBACK) who leads the payments business, Sumeet Singh (ex-Partner, Amarchand Mangaldas) as General Counsel and Head of Corporate Strategy and Amit Jain as the Chief Risk Officer.

 

Parth will bring his in-depth understanding of brands, product development and marketing to fuel BharatPe’s continued growth. In the past, Parth has played a key role in building many brands across geographies in multi-national companies. Prior to joining BharatPe, Parth was the Head of Marketing– Global Expansion Markets, Reckitt based out of Singapore. He has also held various marketing roles in GSK & L’Oréal. Parth is an alumnus of MDI, Gurgaon.

 

Commenting on the appointment, Ashneer Grover, Co-Founder and CEO, BharatPe said, “As we chase bigger ambitions, it is key to ensure that the brand and marketing strategy of the company keeps pace with the our evolving business. I would like to extend a warm welcome to Parth as he joins our leadership team.

I am confident that Parth’s experience with FMCG giants will be instrumental as we aspire to build BharatPe as a preferred financial services and credit partner for tens of millions of merchants. Also, his in-depth understanding of consumer aspirations and behaviour would be key as we build products like BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) for the end customers and scale PAYBACK in India in the times to come.”

 

Added Parth, “BharatPe has seen stupendous growth over the last couple of years. It is phemonenal how India has accepted digital payments and BharatPe has been at the forefront of this transformation. I am looking forward to build BharatPe as the preferred brand for our customers. We also have big plans for the consumer side and I am excited to lead and build this business with the team.”