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Merchants payments platform BharatPe has launched gold loans for merchants partners, marking their entry in the secured loans category.

The company has partnered with RBI-approved NBFCs to offer gold loans of up to Rs 20 lakh. BharatPe has already launched the gold loan offering for its merchants in Delhi-NCR, Bengalury, and Hyderabad, and will be scaling this to 20 cities by the end of 2022. 

The startup has set a target of facilitating disbursals of Rs 500 crore by the end of 2022. 

“Credit gap is one of the biggest roadblocks in the growth journey of offline retailers. Over the last couple of years, we have been aggressively focussing on solving this by facilitating unsecured loans in partnership with NBFCs. We have been able to facilitate disbursals of over Rs 3,000 crore to three lakh merchant partners. With gold loan, we have ventured into the big-ticket, secured loan category,” said Suhail Sameer, CEO, BharatPe.

BharatPe is facilitating gold loans at an interest rate of 0.39 percent per month. The loan application process is fully digital and the company claims that the loan is disbursed within 30 minutes of completion of the assessment process.

The company is providing doorstep as well as branch collection facilities, in partnership with NBFC partners. The merchants can take loans for a duration of six, nine and 12 months, and have an option to repay the loan via Easy Daily Instalments (EDI). BharatPe will also be launching the EMI option for repayment shortly. The QR code-enabled product offering makes gold loan applications easy, with minimal paperwork.

“Gold loan will enable us to further empower our merchant partners and positively impact millions of small businesses. We had conducted a pilot for the product for two months, and the response has been very encouraging. We facilitated disbursals of Rs 10 crore during the pilot phase. We are confident that with our lucrative gold loan product that is available at competitive interest rate, industry-best disbursal rate and with the option to pay via EDI, we will be able to facilitate gold loan disbursals of Rs 500 crore by the end of the year,” Suhail added. 

BharatPe has been facilitating unsecured loans of up to Rs 7 lakh, to offline merchants and kirana store owners. The company offers collateral-free loans for three, six and 12 months duration. 

BharatPe announced that it has increased its network of POS business (BharatSwipe) by 25X to more than 250 cities in the last 12 months. BharatPe has already deployed over 1.25 lakh BharatSwipe machines across offline shops.