Mumbai: BharatPe, one of India’s fintech companies, today announced that it has achieved a big milestone by clocking 106 million transactions/ month in the UPI QR payments category in March 2021. BharatPe continued its trend of outgrowing the market, with an 8.8% market share. It also announced that it retained the No. 3 positions in the UPI P2M category, the spot that it had achieved in November 2020 by displacing Google Pay. BharatPe recorded US$ 830 mn worth of transactions (US$ 10 bn annualized) in March 2021.
Over the last 12 months, BharatPe has grown exponentially and has been able to establish itself as one of the fastest adopted payment systems in the UPI person-to-merchant (P2M) segment. The company has recorded a growth of 7x in the volume of UPI transactions from April 2020 to March 2021. Additionally, its UPI payments vertical grew by 23.7% from February to March 2021.
Speaking on the company’s achievement, Suhail Sameer, Group President, BharatPe, said “The pandemic accelerated the growth of digital payments in the country. In fact, we saw all our business verticals grow manifold over the last year- we outgrew the market in UPI P2M consistently, became the largest B2B fintech lender, and also emerged as the No. 3 private POS player in India. Our growth in the UPI P2M category has been driven by the rise in the adoption of digital payments across tier-1, 2, and beyond towns and cities. With customers moving to digital payments, owing to convenience and safety, we saw a huge spike in digital transactions beyond our top 30 cities. In order to cater to the increased demand, we expanded our footprint from 30 to 100 cities in the last 12 months.”
Added Sameer, “We are focused on creating awareness about digital payments and bringing the new-age Fintech services and credit offerings to the last mile in India and hence, will be further adding another 100 cities to our presence in FY22. We aim to expand our merchant network by adding 4 million merchants to our existing list of 6 million by the end of 2021. This 100+ million transaction milestone is a testimony of the merchant’s trust in BharatPe. We are confident that we will be able to positively impact millions of more businesses in the new fiscal with our range of existing and upcoming fintech products, especially curated to address the requirements of the merchant community.”
India has seen phenomenal growth in digital payments over the last year. UPI payments more than doubled from 1.0 billion transactions in April 2020 to 2.7 billion transactions in March 2021, with the TPV growing from US$ 22 billion to US$ 72 billion in March 2021. As per a recent report by ACI Worldwide and Global Data, India has outpaced the USA and China to become the world’s biggest real-time digital payments market, driven by P2P as well as merchant payments. As per the report, it is expected that by 2025, digital payments collectively in India would account for 70+% of overall payments volume, leaving cash and cheques at below 30%. The report also highlighted that globally, more than 70 billion real-time payment transactions were processed in 2020, a surge of 41% compared to the previous year, as the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated trends away from cash and cheques and towards greater reliance on real-time and digital payments.
BharatPe is committed to helping small merchants and Kirana store owners grow their businesses. It has a range of fintech products for merchants- an interoperable UPI QR with zero transaction fees, business loans at lucrative interest rates, and India’s first zero-rental POS machine for accepting payments from a range of debit and credit cards. The company recently launched its innovative lending product- Distributor to Retailer (D2R) Finance, designed to provide instant liquidity to distributors, wholesalers, traders, and dealers across industry verticals. With this product, BharatPe offers collateral-free loans of up to Rs. 50 lakhs for a period of 7 days to 30 days. The company aspires to become a Digital Bank for merchants that can serve as a one-stop destination for all merchant needs and the lending business will play a key role in this journey. It has set a target of 3x growth in its payments business and aiming for US$30B TPV by March 2023.
