Forget Ashneer Grover, BharatPe Sees Record Growth, Expected to List in 18-24 Months

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BharatPe puts behind Ashneer Grover episode and posts record growth

New Delhi:

Putting behind the controversy around co-founder Ashneer Grover, fintech startup BharatPe posted record growth in the fiscal year ended March 31 and is on track to break even and go public. to go public in the next 18 to 24 months, its CEO Suhail Sameer mentioned.

In an interview with PTI, he said that while the board will decide what to do with the money allegedly defrauded by Grover, its priority is to keep company employees focused and teams stay stable.

“The second goal is to keep firing on the commercial front. From a long-term perspective, that’s all that’s going to matter to me, my teams. I’m just doubling down on those things,” he said. he declares.

And this focus has paid off.

“Business in the last quarter (Jan-March) grew by 20% on every metric – transactions, POS, loans facilitated and revenue. And this despite the fact that January was (hit by) COVID, and everything was slowing down a bit. Delhi was closed; many cities had weekend curfews,” he said.

BharatPe, which enables store owners to make digital payments via QR codes, is now present in 225 cities (more than 2x growth compared to last fiscal year) and has more than 8 million merchants on board (vs. 5 million in FY21 which ended March 31, 2021).

“Transaction value (TPV) grew 2.5x year-on-year to $16 billion in 2021-22 (April 2021 to March 2022) machines deployed. We transacted 4 billion there dollars in March,” he said.

The number of traders who received loans rose to 3 lakh from 1.6 lakh a year ago.

“How many loans facilitated — exactly 3x. We facilitated $650 million in loans last year (FY22),” he said.

PostPe, the buy now, pay later product that the company launched five months ago, carries one million transactions per month and $50 million per month POS.

“Overall, from a business perspective, revenue was up almost four times year-on-year. And we’ll end the year at an annualized $110 million, versus $31-32 million. dollars (last year),” he said. “From 6 million dollars, we became 110 million dollars in 18-20 months.”

BharatPe is eyeing an 85% increase in TVP to $30 billion in the current fiscal year, increasing facilitated loans to $2 billion.

“The last 2-3 years has been a kind of network expansion, the next 2-3 years we will continue to expand the network, but we will somehow double the loans. PostPe will be multiplied by 4 – from 50 million TPV dollars to 200 million TPV dollars. Seems like a big number (but) I’m confident we’ll get there.”

Current fiscal year revenue is expected to reach $300 million and the merchant base is expected to reach 12 million.

“Currently, we are facilitating loans worth around Rs 800 crore per month. We want to increase this to Rs 2,050 crore per month by March 2023,” he said.

BharatPe plans to expand to 300 cities by the end of FY23 and expand its gold lending offering to 20 cities by 2022.

Last month, BharatPe stripped Grover of all titles and positions after a third-party audit alleged serious governance lapses under his leadership. But that didn’t stop the feuds between him and the company’s management, including the CEO.

Sameer said the board would take a call on what to do with the audit report that was received.

“I’m focused on business.” He further stated that the company is looking at an initial public offering (IPO) in 18-24 months, by which time the TPV would have reached $40-45 billion, with revenue of $500 million.”

“The merchant business would become profitable in 12 to 15 months.”

In preparation for the IPO, BharatPe will be looking for deeper products.

“We used to do unsecured lending initially with our NBFC partners, then we launched secured lending, but a few months ago, and now we want to launch auto lending at some point,” he said. he said, adding that the company would seek to allow merchants to acquire customers.

“Thanks to the commitment and hard work of our world-class team, BharatPe recorded the strongest quarter in its history. We recorded 4x growth in our overall revenue compared to the same period last year. On a sequential quarter-over-quarter basis, growth was 30%, despite the third wave of COVID-19.

“Comparing month over month, all of our metrics grew at the fastest rate – total merchant payment value or POS (17%), consumer POS (39%), facilitated loans ( 31%) and revenue (21 percent) in March 2022 compared to February 2022,” he pointed out.

As we move forward, “we strive to break even in our merchant business and further strengthen our consumer business,” he said.

Asked about raising funds, he said BharatPe has $400 million in the bank and a monthly consumption of $4 million, so he does not need to raise capital.

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