BharatPe Group on Tuesday announced the successful acquisition of a majority stake in Mumbai-based NBFC Trillion Loans in April.
Trillion Loans provides secured and unsecured loans to SMEs, as well as small business and working capital loans. The NBFC also offers auto, gold, and education loans to consumers.
Says Shashvat Nakrani, founder and COO, BharatPe, “Acquiring controlling stake in Trillion Loans is aligned to the BharatPe Group’s larger purpose and will enable us to facilitate access to capital to a wider set of underserved and unbanked businesses as well as customers. Trillion Loans will work independently and will be a technology-driven NBFC.”
Trillion Loans will operate as an independent entity with its own team and will seek partnerships with other fintechs to provide credit to businesses and consumers. It will be open to partner with other fintechs and startups, to offer a quick and streamlined experience.
“BharatPe values its existing partnerships with NBFCs, and financial institutions and this acquisition will have no impact on these relationships,” Nakrani said.
The new deal will see advisor to the board, Ravindra Pandey, CFO Nalin Negi; and head of banking vertical, Sabyasachi Senapati of BharatPe joining Trillion Loans’ board. BharatPe Group has invested a substantial amount of money into Trillion Loans to help grow its loan book.
“BharatPe plans to leverage its expertise in product development and technology to support Trillion Loans in creating innovative digital lending products for various business owners and customers and that this partnership presents a significant opportunity for Trillion Loans to continue growing and address the large MSME credit gap and meet consumer credit demands in India,” said Nakrani.
BharatPe was established in 2018, and introduced the country’s first UPI interoperable QR code and the first zero MDR payment acceptance service. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, BharatPe launched BharatSwipe, a card acceptance terminal.
The company presently serves one crore merchants in more than 400 cities, and is a leading provider of UPI offline transactions, handling over 30 crore UPI transactions monthly, with an annualized Transaction Processed Value of over $24 billion in payments. The company has disbursed loans worth nearly ₹8,000 crore, and its POS business processes over $3.5 billion in payments annually on its machines.
BharatPe has raised more than $583 million in equity to date, with investors including Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Ribbit Capital, and Sequoia Capital, among others. Most recently, the BharatPe Group was given an in-principle authorization by the RBI to function as an online payment aggregator.
