BharatPe enters gold loan segment; eyes disbursals of Rs 500 cr this year

Crisis-ridden fintech player BharatPe has entered the gold loan segment for its merchant partners, marking its entry into the secured credit category for a firm that hawks a slew of unsecured small ticket credit products.

The Gurugram-based company has been mired in a lot of scandals, which led to one of its founders being thrown out of the firm recently. It is also under various probes by enforcement agencies. The company is also the co-promoter of Unity Small Finance Bank.

For launching gold loans, BharatPe has partnered with a few NBFCs, and will be offering loans of up to Rs 20 lakh against gold pledge.

The service is already available to its merchant customers in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and it will be scaling this to 20 cities by the end of this year when it hopes to disburse Rs 500 crore, BharatPe said in a statement on Monday.

Its interest rate at the lowest band is 0.39 per cent per month, working out to be 4.7 per cent per annum. The loan application and disbursal is all done digitally within 30 minutes.

It is also offering doorstep as well as branch collection facility and customers can take loans of 6, 9 and 12 months, Suhail Sameer, chief executive of the company said, adding it has run a two-month pilot and facilitated Rs 10 crore of disbursals.

Since its launch, BharatPe has been giving unsecured loans of up to Rs 7 lakh to offline merchants and kirana store owners. It has disbursed over Rs 3,000 crore to 3 lakh merchant partners so far and such loans have tenors of 3, 6 and 12 months.