Axis Bank ties up with BharatPe to expand its merchant acquiring business

With 600,000 terminals, the bank is the third-largest PoS acquiring bank in the payments space

Private sector lender Axis Bank has tied up with BharatPe to expand its merchant acquiring business in the country. As a part of the partnership, Axis Bank will be the acquiring bank for BharatPe’s point of sale (PoS) business, BharatSwipe, and will provide acceptance of credit and debit cards for merchants associated with BharatPe.

With over 600,000 PoS terminals spread across the entire country, Axis Bank is the third largest PoS acquiring bank in the payments acceptance business and processed around Rs 19,000 crore worth of volumes in a month. On the other hand, BharatPe’s PoS machine BharatSwipe has an installed base of 100,000 across 16 cities, processing around Rs 1,400 crore per month. BharatPe clocked an annualised transaction value of $2 billion on PoS terminals at the end of FY21. The company has set a target of $6 billion in transaction processed value (TPV) by FY22.

“This association will help BharatPe enhance merchant experience by leveraging the best-in-class technology platform offered by Axis Bank. Merchants can now enjoy faster payment processing, a more secured and simplified platform, along with a host of other features”, the bank said in a statement.

“We have been continuously working on partnership led models & digital solutions to expand our offerings to the merchant community”, said Sanjeev Moghe, EVP & Head-Cards & Payments, Axis Bank.

“We look forward to partnering with other fintech and e-commerce players to help them ensure merchant stickiness on their QR code installations by providing co-branded POS plus QR and several other value-added services”, he added.

BharatPe has aggressive plans for its PoS business and aims to enable 50 million transactions and grow 3x in the next twelve months by increasing its PoS machines to 300,000 by the end of FY21. “We are also looking at expanding our reach by 5x to 80 cities in the country.  We are also working towards rolling out customer credit offerings as well as add loyalty and rewards features to our POS devices in the coming months”, said Suhail Sameer, Chief Executive Officer, BharatPe.

“In order to achieve these, we will be exploring partnerships with banking and financial institutions that can empower our offering”, he added.