Indifi, GPay Team Up To Source Loans

Small businesses-focused lending platform Indifi on Friday announced a partnership with Alphabet's payment app, Google Pay, for helping it source new lending opportunities from merchants.

Google Pay has 10 million merchants, who will be given the option of availing a pre-approved loan from Indifi in the app itself, based largely on their payment receipts data, Aditya Harkauli, the chief business officer at Indifi, said.

It can be noted that the partnership comes at a time when banking regulator Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has expressed concerns over big tech's growing play in banking activities, especially after the apps started collecting deposits.

Harkauli made it clear that the partnership with GPay is limited to advances alone and added that the lending risk will be taken by a wholly-owned subsidiary of Indifi, which is backed by a slew of investors including Omidyar.

The company already has partnerships with players like Amazon, Flipkart, Swiggy and Zomato to source loans from their respective ecosystems, and the tie-up with GPay is an extension of that.

Harkauli said the partnership is already live and in a year, the company expects 10 per cent of all the loans that it sources, to come from the GPay partnership, and expects the ticket sizes of loans to average about Rs 2.5 lakh.

These will be largely working capital loans for a tenor of 18-30 months, and may also include borrowing from the small merchants for purposes like renovation of shops etc, he said.