BharatPe’s merchant loyalty program achieves big

 BharatPe’s merchant loyalty program achieves big success

·         Clocks 2 lac members in just 6 months of launch of BharatPe Club, its premium membership program

·                                         Company targets 1 million members by June 2022 

BharatPe, India's fastest growing fintech company, today announced that it has received an overwhelming response to BharatPe Club, India’s first ‘merchant only’ loyalty program. Launched earlier this year, BharatPe Club already has a member base of 2 lac offline merchants and kirana store owners across tier-1, 2 and 3 cities and towns. The company is bullish about BharatPe Club and is targeting building a member base of 1 million merchants by June 2022.

BharatPe Club offers a host of benefits to its members, including 0% Loan Processing Fees on business loans, flat ₹1,000 off on BharatSwipe, 20% discount on bill payments, cashback on BharatPe Card, and priority customer service. Additionally, they can take home exclusive merchandise signed by BharatPe brand ambassadors. BharatPe’s merchant partners can become a member of BharatPe Club by paying ₹1,000 as an annual enrolment fee, and can enjoy benefits of upto ₹20,000.

BharatPe Club has witnessed huge success among offline merchants across categories including Grocery, Food and Beverage, Retail, Electronics, Dairy/Fresh Products, Services, Medical/Healthcare, Automobiles, Wholesale/Distribution, Beauty and Wellness. The top cities for BharatPe Club include Hyderabad, Pune, Bengaluru, Delhi, Warangal, Visakhapatnam, Karimnagar, Vijaywada, Chennai, Mumbai, Indore, Guntur and Chittoor. Interestingly, BharatPe Club has seen a huge organic uptake with most of the merchants opting for BharatPe Club, without any marketing push. The top products preferred by the BharatPe Club members include BharatPe account (used by 88% of Club members), business loans (availed by 26% of members) and BharatSwipe machines (opted by 26% of members).

Speaking on the development, Mr. Suhail Sameer, Chief Executive Officer, BharatPe, said, “As we grow, it becomes important for us to build an engaged merchant base and also ensure that we offer a host of additional benefits to our loyal merchant partners. We recently announced that we will be launching world’s first ‘Merchant Shareholding Program (MSP)’ with the objective of providing an opportunity to our merchant partners to become part equity owners of BharatPe. As a part of the program, we will be creating an equity pool structure worth upto US$100 mn to be allotted to eligible merchants over the course of the next 4 years. BharatPe Club was launched with the objective of empowering our merchant partners and rewarding our loyal merchants with additional benefits and cashbacks. Over the last 6 months, we have seen great acceptability for this product amongst merchants across businesses and locations. BharatPe Club has also contributed immensely to our business growth as it has helped us build trust and in turn, enabled merchants to explore additional products from our portfolio of offerings. We have been able to build a 2 lac member strong BharatPe Club and are aiming to cross the 1 million mark by June 2022. With BharatPe Club, we intend to offer a wide range of services to all our merchants, strengthening their bond with the brand.” 

BharatPe is a merchant first company and has been launching Fintech products that can help offline merchants grow their business. The company has grown exponentially over the last 18 months, clocking multi-fold growth in digital payments, lending as well as POS business. The company has been aggressively expanding across cities and is currently present in 140+ cities. Its business loans are available in 11,000 pin codes across 24 states in India. BharatPe had crossed US$13 bn in annualized payment number last month and plans to ramp it up to US$ 30 bn by March 23. Also, it has set a target of building a loan book of US$ 5 bn in the next 5 years to address the unmet credit gap amongst millions of SMEs 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 forays into consumer fintech domain with

BharatPe forays into consumer fintech domain with
the launch of 12% Club

·         First-of-its-kind investment and borrowing app for consumers, in partnership with RBI approved NBFCs

·         Offers up to 12% interest annually for consumer investments with no lock-in

·         Consumers can borrow up to Rs 10 lacs at an interest rate of 12%

·         Targets investment of US$ 100mn and loan book of US$ 50mn from the product in the first year

BharatPe, one of India’s fastest growing fintech companies, today announced its foray into the consumer space with the launch of its first-of-its-kind consumer product- 12% Club. Available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store, this product is set to redefine the rules of consumer lending and investments. With 12% Club, consumers will have an option to invest and earn upto 12% annual interest or borrow at a competitive interest rate of 12%. BharatPe has partnered with RBI approved NBFCs to offer this investment-cum-borrowing product for consumers. The company aims to achieve an investment AUM of US$ 100 mn and a lending AUM of US$ 50 mn from this product, by the end of the current fiscal.

The consumers on the 12% Club app can invest their savings anytime by choosing to lend money through BharatPe’s partner P2P NBFCs. Additionally, consumers can avail collateral-free loans of upto Rs. 10 lacs on the 12% Club app for a tenure of 3 months, as per their convenience. There are no processing charges or pre-payment charges on the consumer loans. The loan eligibility will be defined based on a number of factors including consumer’s credit score, the shopping history using PAYBACK loyalty system or the payments done via BharatPe QR.

The consumers investing via the 12% Club app can put in a request to withdraw their investment anytime, partially or completely, without any withdrawal charges. They can start their investment journey by investing as low as Rs. 1000 and enjoy daily credit of interest. The upper limit for investment by an individual is currently set at Rs. 10 lacs and would be increased to Rs 50 lac over the next few months.

Commenting on the launch, Suhail Sameer, Chief Executive Officer, BharatPe said, “As we begin our journey on the consumer side, our focus will be to launch products that are industry shaping, 100% digital and easy to use. This one-of-its-kind product for consumers has been designed to ensure industry-best benefits both for lenders, as well as borrowers. We believe that 12% Club will strike the right chord with a diverse set of new-age digitally savvy customers- from young salaried individuals, to professionals with disposable incomes, as well as the investors who park their funds in various financial instruments. The initial response has been phenomenal. In the pilot phase, we have seen great traction with US$ 5mn of monthly investment run rate and US$ 1mn of monthly borrowing run rate. We are confident that this product will be well received in the market and will play a key role in driving financial inclusion in the country. This is just the beginning and we will be adding new customer products during the rest of the financial year.”

Added Suhail, “BharatPe’s P2P lending product for merchants has been one of our industry defining products with Gross Investments of close to US$ 700mn done by over 6.3 lac merchants. Also, we are one of the largest B2B Fintech lenders in the country, having disbursed over US$ 300 mn in business loans to over 2 lac merchant partners”

In order to begin the journey of investments/ borrowing via the 12% Club, a customer needs to follow the steps below:

ü  Download the 12% Club app by visiting the link

ü  Complete the sign-up process

ü  Create the 12% Club account and accept T&Cs

ü  Start investments or borrowing journey with 12% Club

Today, BharatPe is a trusted fintech partner for millions of small merchants in India. Over the last 3 years, we have led the way and launched disruptive products to empower merchants- from India’s first interoperable UPI QR, to collateral free business loans and India’s first zero rental POS machines. These products have been well received and have been key contributors for driving financial inclusion for small merchants and kirana store owners.

Recently, BharatPe forayed into the unicorn club with Series E fund raise of US$ 350 mn at a valuation of US$ 2.85 bn. The round, led by Tiger Global, also saw new participation from Dragoneer Investment Group and Steadfast Capital. Five out of the seven existing institutional investors participated in the round - namely Coatue Management, Insight Partners, Sequoia Growth, Ribbit Capital and Amplo. 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.