India’s largest merchant payment company, BharatPe, on Thursday announced aggressive expansion plans across tier-1, 2 and 3 cities in the country. BharatPe, that is currently present in more than 35 cities, plans to substantially scale up its presence by adding another 30 cities to its list by December 2020.
The cities, spread across India, include tier-1 cities like Kolkata and Chennai, emerging cities like Coimbatore, Kochi, Dehradun, Nagpur, Bhubaneswar, Patna as well as tourist hubs like Amritsar, Varanasi, Agra, Allahabad, amongst others. The company aims to add another 3 million merchants to its existing list of over 5 million merchants by the end of FY 21.
The announcement is in line with the company’s commitment to become the preferred financial services partner for over 60 million SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) in India.
Additionally, BharatPe would be offering attractive collateral-free loans of upto Rs 7 lakh at competitive interest rates to merchants, with the objective of helping them grow their business. BharatPe will offer its hybrid repayment model with a combination of daily QR/ POS collection and weekly payments made directly from the bank account to the merchants availing loans.
Speaking on the expansion, Suhail Sameer, Group President, BharatPe, said “The pandemic has fuelled exponential growth of digital payments industry in the country as a large number of customers are opting for cashless payments. We have seen our business grow manifold over the last few months. Our payments vertical has recorded consistent double digit growth on a month-on-month basis. Also, our lending vertical has scaled very well and we are on track to disburse loans of Rs 1000 crore by the end of the year.”
“We are committed to create a well-rounded financial ecosystem for SMEs with our variety of products including payments, loans, gold and insurance. This decision to double our footprint in the country is in line with this. We have handpicked cities that are either business hubs or emerging commercial centres, for this phase of expansion. We look forward to enabling millions of more businesses in the new cities we are venturing in,” Suhail added.
BharatPe will be rolling out its range of financial services for merchants, across all the new cities. These include Amritsar, Kota, Guntur, Kakinada, Rajmundri, Jodhpur, Coimbatore, Madurai, Nagpur, Kochi, Trichy, Raipur, Trivandrum, Bilaspur, Durg Bhilai, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Kolkata, Patna, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Jamshedpur, Chennai, Agra, Allahabad, Aurangabad, Dehradun, Patiala, Rohtak, Silchar, Agartala, Shillong and Varanasi.
The company will be rolling out it’s one-of-a-kind interoperable UPI QR with zero transaction fees, and it’s recently launched zero rental, zero fees card acceptance machine (BharatSwipe) in the new cities.
