Spice Money: Industry Monitoring 21 May 2019
- Priyanka Kanodia
- Jun 6, 2019
- 3 min read
Spice Money
Competitors
Industry News
BharatPe lines up loans for merchants
Publication- ET Tech
Edition- Online
Date- 21 May, 2019
Sequoia Capital-backed digital payments startup BharatPe has started extending small value, short duration loans to merchants by partnering with a few non-banking finance companies. It is also planning to apply for its own lending licence to lend to merchants who are accepting payments through BharatPe QR codes, showing consistent transactions on the platform for the last three months. The development means it joins an already crowded club of other internet companies such as Cars24, Flipkart and Ola which have also taken a plunge into credit. "We have started a pilot for our lending product in Bengaluru and given out a few hundred loans only based on cash flow that the merchant generates through our QR code," said Ashneer Grover, cofounder of BharatPe. "Lending will be one of our monetisation plans and we intend to scale it up slowly from here."
The New Delhi-based startup has partnered with Apollo Finvest for such loans and plans to rope in more partners. BharatPe, which offers loans in the range of 10,000 to 1 lakh, charges an interest rate of 1.67% per month, cheaper than what local money lenders offer to this category of merchants. BharatPe wants to co-lend in collaboration with other financiers and try to keep interest rates under control once it gets a licence. "The repayment model is that we deduct a small value from the amount that gets paid to the merchant through our QR code which reduces the risk associated with these loans," Grover said.
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How UPI is giving e-payments a run for their money
Publication- Livemint
Edition- Online
Date- 21 May, 2019
What is the reason behind the growing popularity of UPI?
The growing popularity of UPI can be attributed to its simple, safe, cost-effective and mobile-based payment system. Companies such as Paytm, PhonePe, MobiKwik and GooglePay, along with 144 banks, also offer payments via UPI, which surpassed mobile wallet payments in terms of volume of transactions as well as value. There were 384.89 million mobile wallet transactions worth ₹15,990 crore in March, compared to 799.54 million UPI transactions worth ₹1.33 trillion during the same month. As their awareness and comfort increase, people are moving towards UPI to carry out high-value transactions.
What are its advantages?
UPI lets a user transfer money across multiple bank accounts in real time, without revealing details of a beneficiary’s bank account. Money can be immediately sent via one’s mobile phone at any time, regardless of a bank’s working hours. Most modes of bank-dependent digital payments are limited by the time of day and holidays.
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MobiKwik thrives on targeting Bharat, witnesses 2X jump in revenue growth in FY19
Publication- EN Tracker
Edition- Online
Date- 21 May, 2019
MobiKwik’s annual report for FY19 says it’s building financial services for Bharat. The angle here, as elaborated by Founder and CEO Bipin Preet Singh in a blog post, is to not count on the unbanked, but the underbanked users. What is this underbanked user? These are the 750 million banks accounts out of the total 900 million that are enrolled in Public Sector Unit (PSU) banks where the account holders are mostly from lower middle class. Why? Because they have access to lesser quality tech assistance, wealth management and other financial services provided by PSUs.
And Mobikwik within the last very year has gone from being an e-wallet to a horizontal fintech platform with launch of services like UPI, credit card payment, loans and credit line, insurance, mutual funds, digital gold investment, and instant redemption of mutual funds. All we had wondered at the launch of these services was how much dent it would create in the market, or in the company’s performance.
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Committee on Digital Payments submits report to RBI; India delivers Mi-24 choppers to Afghanistan – Current Affairs
Publication- Jagran Josh
Edition- Online
Date- 21 May, 2019
Nandan Nilekani-headed High-Level Committee on Deepening of Digital Payments on May 17, 2019 submitted its report to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) The Committee submitted the report after much deliberation with the consultations and various stakeholders.
The Reserve Bank will now examine the recommendations of the Committee. If necessary, the bank will merge the recommendations with the recently released ‘Payment Systems Vision 2021’, published on May 15, 2019. The RBI constituted a High-Level Committee on Deepening of Digital Payments on January 8, 2018 to encourage digitisation of payments under the Chairmanship of Nandan Nilekani, former Chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI. The Committee was asked to submit its report within a period of 90 days from the date of its first meeting.
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