BharatPe announced on March 14 that it will be providing gold loan services to its merchant partners. The company’s new product marks its foray into the secured loan category. BharatPe has partnered with RBI-approved non-banking financial companies to start offering gold loans of up to Rs 20 lakh.

The company is offering the new service to partnered merchants in New Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad. BharatPe aims to expand its services to 20 cities and disburse Rs 500 crore by end-2022.

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The loan will be provided at an interest rate of 0.39 percent per month or 4.68 percent per annum. The loan application process is completely digital and the company claims to disburse the loan within 30 minutes of the application assessment.

Partnered merchants are able to look at the available loans through the BharatPe app and apply for the loan through the app itself. The loans are available in six months, nine months and 12 months tenure with EMI options for repayments being launched soon.

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“With gold loan, we have ventured into the big-ticket, secured loan category. 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 2 months and the response has been very encouraging. We facilitated disbursals of Rs 10 crore during the pilot phase,” said Suhail Sameer, CEO, BharatPe.

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The company has already been disbursing unsecured loans of up to Rs 7 lakh to various offline merchants and store owners. The loans are collateral free and are available in three, six and 12 month tenures with the application being completely digital as well.

“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 3000 crore to 3 lac merchant partners,” Sameer added in the company’s statement.

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(Edited by : Shoma Bhattacharjee)

First Published:Mar 14, 2022 8:13 PM IST