BharatPe to double down on online payments after RBI licence approval

The push comes amid RBI's final licence approval and intensifying competition

BharatPe is ramping up its payments play, leveraging its payment aggregator licence and a payments stack built with Unity Small Finance Bank, where it owns 49 per cent stake.

 

The company is targeting to take on board at least 100 large online merchants, including the likes of e-commerce brands, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), ride hailing platforms, educational institutions, among others.

 

The Gurugram-based firm, with a base of three to four million offline merchants, plans to reduce reliance on other banks, while expanding its payments stack at Unity SFB.

 

“Our focus would be to onboard top 100 merchants in top 10 different segments. The main differentiator is this payment stack,” Sandeep Indurkar, chief executive officer (CEO), Resilient Payments; a BharatPe subsidiary, told Business Standard.

 

The focus on expanding the online payment aggregator business comes at a time when the company received final licence from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in May. Intensifying competition, with new fintechs and legacy players targeting the same clients, has been another factor.

 

Indurkar said integration with Unity SFB gives the company full visibility over its transaction services, thereby improving service efficiency.

 

“If a bank (server) goes down, you cannot go to their data centre and solve it. That was a dependency which we wanted to remove. We have complete visibility since the payments stack is built by BharatPe,” he added. 

 

Major players in the online payment aggregator markets include CCAvenue, BillDesk, PayU, Cashfree Payments and Razorpay, among others. 

 

The company is also working with two other banks to build its payments stack, ensuring de-risking from a single and operational stability.

 

“We are working with two large banks to have a similar payment stack integrated with them. The structure is designed in such a way that control mechanisms are in place, there is segregation of infrastructure, operating systems, data and administration, among others,” he explained. 

 

BharatPe is also exploring ways to use AI to support  internal tech teams. “We track the top three projects across businesses, for those we cannot pursue due to limited tech bandwidth, we are evaluating whether AI can help take them up,” he said.

 

The fintech reported a turnaround after it clocked profitability, posting ₹6 crore in adjusted profit before tax (PBT) in FY25 as compared to a loss of ₹342 crore in FY24. It reported an operating revenue of ₹1,667 crore in FY25, a 16.9 per cent increase from ₹1,426 crore it generated in FY24.

 

For BharatPe, around ₹1,000 crore in revenue comes from financial services. This includes revenue from lending through partnerships and its NBFC arm. The rest comes from payments, revenue from payment acceptance devices, and other sources.

 

It plans to maintain a contribution mix of 60 per cent from financial services and 40 per cent from payments.