Tag: platform

Fintech platform Groww raises $251 m in Series-E funding

Banking & Finance

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Fintech platform Groww has raised $251 million at a valuation of $3 billion, led by ICONIQ Growth. The current round also saw participation from investors like Alkeon, Lone Pine Capital and Steadfast.

Groww’s existing investors Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, YC Continuity, Tiger Global and Propel Venture Partners also participated in the round.

Extending reach

Started in 2016, Groww enables Indian retail investors to invest in direct mutual funds, stocks, ETFs and IPO. Groww plans to extend its reach to the under-penetrated geographies, strengthen the team and scale tech infrastructure. The company also plans to continue making significant investments in spreading financial education and awareness.

Lalit Keshre, CEO and Co-Founder of Groww, said, “Over the last five years, we have built a product that customers love and have lowered the barriers to investing across India. We are making a difference in the lives of millions of Indians by democratising access. And it seems the journey has just begun with such a huge opportunity ahead of us.”

Financial services market

“Groww has been helping transform the way India invests by building a platform that exemplifies simplicity, trust, and constant innovation. The financial services market in India is already large, growing rapidly, and ripe for disruption. During the last couple of years, Groww has demonstrated that they are ready to seize that opportunity through strong accelerating momentum predicated on strength of technology,” said Yoonkee Sull, partner at ICONIQ Growth.

Groww was founded by Lalit Keshre, Harsh Jain, Neeraj Singh and Ishan Bansal. Groww enables retail investors to access financial products and services through its web and mobile app on both iOS and Android. Groww is backed by marquee investors, including Sequoia Capital India, Y Combinator, Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global and Iconiq Growth.

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Oakridge raises funds on German crowdfunding platform

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Oakridge Rooftops has raised an undisclosed amount through a German crowdfunding platform for its solar projects in India.

“Oakridge Rooftops, a leading rooftop solar power company, has raised crowd financing from Germany for its portfolio of urban solar projects in New Delhi,” a statement said.

The company did not disclose the amount of funding.

This is the first time an Indian rooftop solar company has tapped into the large European crowd financing market.

According to the statement, this fund-raise opens doors for Indian companies for more innovative sources of international financing to develop renewable energy projects in India.

The company, in collaboration with leading German crowd-funding platform Bettervest Gmbh, obtained necessary regulatory approvals from the financial regulator BAFIN to get listed for investment.

Customer-base

Oakridge has over 1,000 customers in North India, including over 400 projects in Delhi itself. The company has installed rooftop solar plants in government buildings, Delhi government schools, colleges, hospitals, industrial and commercial establishments.

Oakridge CEO Shravan Sampath said, “We are happy to be solarising a part of our Delhi solar portfolio through crowdfunding through retail investors in Germany. We have always focussed on developing niche projects and offering the best possible returns to our partners. It was nice to see the extent of interest there was in the German market for Indian projects”.

Marilyn Heib, CEO, Bettervest Gmbh said, “Oakridge is one of our premium partners in the solar space, and the Oakridge rooftops’ portfolio is also the single largest project we have ever financed until date”.

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SBI extends partnership with TCS for another 5 years

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Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) on Wednesday announced that its long-standing client State Bank of India (SBI) has extended its partnership for another five years.

SBI has been using TCS BaNCS for over two decades now. As a part of the new contract, TCS will continue to maintain and enhance SBI’s application estate around core banking, trade finance, financial reporting, and financial inclusion with new features and functionality. This will support the bank’s ability to launch newer offerings and respond to business and regulatory changes.

Digital solutions for Gen Next banking

In addition, TCS will continue to leverage its contextual knowledge of SBI’s business and technology landscape to help the bank with large transformation programmes to help its customers make their day-to-day banking easy and secure. In the most recent such engagement, TCS is helping build Bharat Craft — an omnichannel, online B2B e-commerce platform which would serve as a marketplace for MSMEs, jointly driven by SBI and the Government of India.

As fintechs turn up the heat, banks must up their tech game

Prior to that, TCS collaborated with SBI to execute the simultaneous merger of five associate banks and Bharatiya Mahila Bank. The colossal undertaking involved integrating over 200 business processes, over 43 IT applications, 17,500 products, and over 50 billion database records, impacting over 50,000 tellers across 7,000 branches. Immaculate planning and execution ensured accomplishment of all goals, without any interruption to services, in just six weeks, TCS said.

‘Valuable partner’

Ravindra Pandey, DMD & CIO, SBI, said, “Technology and innovation have been at the core of SBI’s growth and transformation journey over the last two decades. TCS has been a valuable partner since the beginning and has supported us in building and running a high-performing, resilient and scalable core banking platform that is foundational to all our digital initiatives. We are pleased to extend our relationship with TCS as we continue to work together to launch new initiatives for enhanced customer experience.”

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Flexmoney raises $4.8 million in Series A funding

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Flexmoney, a digital credit network platform for lenders and merchants, has raised $4.8 million in Series A funding, led by Pravega Ventures with participation from Silicon Valley-based Z5 Capital.

The round also saw participation from several marquee individual investors including Ben Davey, former Group Head of Strategy, Barclays Bank & CEO Barclays Ventures; Mike Smith, former Chief Product & Technology Officer, Barclays Ventures & Director, Amazon Core Display Ad Platform; Ambarish Malpani, successful serial entrepreneur and technologist and Rishad Byramjee, Group MD and CEO Casby Logistics & Board Member, Centrum Group.

Flexmoney aims to use the funds to scale its credit network footprint to more lenders and merchants, launch additional products and consolidate its position. Flexmoney had previously raised seed funding from multiple global and domestic angel investors.

Nanda Krish, General Partner at Z5 Capital, said: “InstaCred by Flexmoney is already the largest ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ platform in India, and the need and potential for this Internet credit infrastructure spans across even more global markets. We’re proud and excited to partner with Flexmoney to scale up and revolutionise the credit ecosystem in India and across the globe”.

Yezdi Lashkari, Founder and CEO of Flexmoney Technologies, said, “Flexmoney’s digital credit platform provides a seamless and secure ‘plug and play’ proposition for trusted lenders and merchants to offer the widest set of options for frictionless, secure, instant checkout finance to their customers and is transforming their purchase experience. With this funding, we are one step closer to achieving our vision of simplifying and democratising consumer credit in India”.

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Paytm empowers users in Kerala to pay their electricity bills 24×7

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Digital financial services platform Paytm has announced that users in Kerala can now pay their electricity bill 24×7 on the platform.

The company has also announced an assured reward on every bill payment. Users paying the electricity bill for the first time on the platform will get a guaranteed cash back of up to ₹50.

A company spokesman said Paytm is a pioneer in electricity bill payments and has partnered with over 70 electricity boards across the country to serve millions of users in this segment.

Paytm leads India’s digital payments with 1.2 billion monthly transactions

Reminders through SMS

To bring more convenience to its users, it has recently enhanced its UI for electricity bill payments that takes less than a minute to complete a transaction. Users need to simply choose their State and service provider, enter their bill number or customer account number and then make that payment. The payment is instant, and users get a receipt on completion of bill payment. Paytm also reminds about the due date for payments through SMS and in-app notifications.

Telangana power regulator for rapid deployment of smart meters

Paytm, which has a 20 million-strong merchant base, is seeing more businesses extensively accepting payments online. Since April 2020, it has witnessed a massive surge in digital payments for electricity bills as more people avoid venturing out, standing in queues and, most importantly, touching cash in the Covid situation.

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Lendingkart’s NBFC arm raises ₹108 crore from Dutch bank FMO

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Lendingkart, a financial services and fintech start-up, announced a new round of fund raising of $15 million (₹108 crore) in debt funding from FMO, the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank. With this deal, Lendingkart strengthens its three-year relationship with the bank, having received funds through NCDs (non-convertible debentures) and increasing its cumulative exposure to $19 million with this transaction.

FMO supports sustainable private sector growth in developing countries and emerging markets. This new influx of funds to Lendingkart will be utilised towards expanding the reach of financial products to the MSME segment through Lendingkart’s digital platform across 100 sub-industries spread across India.

Lendingkart to launch ‘credit intelligence services’ for banks

Lendingkart Group is a leading Fintech company in India, providing short-term working capital loans to SME borrowers under Lendingkart Finance Limited — a non-deposit taking NBFC arm of Lendingkart Group. Founded in 2014 by Harshvardhan Lunia, Lendingkart has evaluated nearly half a million applications, disbursing 1,00,000+ loans to more than 91,000 MSMEs in 1300+ cities across all 29 States and Union Territories of the nation, making it the NBFC with the largest geographical footprint in the country.

Focus on women entrepreneurs

The Group which has received an equity infusion of ₹1,050 crore to date, is financed by reputed international investors like Fullerton Financial Holding (FFH) (100 per cent subsidiary of Singapore Sovereign Fund Temasek Holdings), Saama Capital, Mayfield India, Bertelsmann, Sistema Asia and India Quotient. The Group had received an equity infusion of ₹319 crore in FY 2021.

Lendingkart ramps up headcount, promotes high performers

“We raised ₹1,800 crore in debt funding last fiscal. To support our growth plans we plan to raise a further ₹3,000 crore in debt funding from PSU and Private Banks, Small Banks, NBFCs, AIFs, HNIs and Overseas Funds. We are targeting 40 per cent growth over the pre-Covid year, this fiscal. We closed last fiscal with ₹30 crore in profits and sustained this till December 2020 despite the pandemic. With this new fund raise, Lendingkart will fast-track its efforts to improve financial inclusion and credit reach to 5,000 + new MSMEs with a focus on small businesses and women entrepreneurs,” Sudeep Bhatia, Lendingkart Group CFO, told BusinessLine. By FY 22, Lendingkart has planned to onboard 1.25 lakh MSMEs on its portfolio.

“Lendingkart Finance is a fast-evolving company and has become a leader in the fintech space in India. The new transaction is aligned to FMO’s ambition to accelerate financial inclusion through innovative technological solutions. As India recovers from the pandemic and uncertainties presented by it, we are pleased we can partner with Lendingkart to better support its customers, with a focus towards women-run businesses and micro enterprises” said Huib-Jan de Ruijter, Chief Investment Officer (a.i.), FMO.

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IndiaLends raises $5.1 mn from existing investors ACP Partners, DSG Consumer Partners

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Digital lending platform IndiaLends has raised $5.1 million in a funding round led by existing investors ACP Partners and DSG Consumer Partners.

“The Delhi-NCR-based firm will use the funds to expand its technology platform, increase its market footprint and amplify its product offerings to meet the pent-up demand in a post-Covid economic recovery,” it said in a statement on Friday.

The company plans to double disbursements to ₹4,000 crore in the next 18 to 24 months with a focused outreach towards retail consumers living across tier I-II cities and tier III towns.

It has disbursed over ₹2,000 crore in personal loans since launch and has more than 80 lakh customers.

“IndiaLends also intends to extend its outreach to the underserved customers, people who are worthy of getting access to credit but are unfortunately left out owing to the lack of reliable credit history,” it further said.

Gaurav Chopra, founder and CEO of IndiaLends, said the fresh round of financing will help the company usher in the next phase of growth. “This investment is a testament to the fact that the sector is going to witness an upward curve in the days to come,” he said.

Apart from traditional banks and NBFCs, IndiaLends also offers pre-qualified loans from all major fintech and P2P lenders to its customers.

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PhonePe captures over 42% of overall UPI P2M market share

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With over 42 per cent of the UPI merchant (P2M) transactions, PhonePe said it has emerged as the largest player in the segment.

“PhonePe recently also emerged as the largest digital payments platform processing over 1.07 billion transactions across UPI, wallet, credit and debit cards,” it said in a statement, adding that this is due to the massive adoption it is seeing in Tier-4,5,6 towns and talukas and a deep focus on driving merchant acceptance in these geographies.

PhonePe to tap new revenue streams in financial services, consumer engagement

PhonePe is today accepted across 18 million kiranas in the country, it further said.

“Our leadership in the P2M space is due to an expansion of the market with more merchants using our platform in smaller towns,” said Vivek Lohcheb, Vice-President – Offline Business Development, PhonePe.

PhonePe maintains market leadership in digital payments

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PhonePe partners with Axis Bank on UPI multi-bank model

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Digital payments platform PhonePe on Monday announced that it has partnered with Axis Bank on a Unified Payments Interface (UPI) multi-bank model.

The partnership will provide PhonePe users with the option to create and use multiple UPI IDs with Axis Bank’s “@axl” handle.

PhonePe will also start acquiring merchants with Axis Bank in addition to its partnership with YES Bank.

PhonePe to tap new revenue streams in financial services, consumer engagement

Digitisation push

Hemant Gala, VP Financial Services & Payments, PhonePe, said, “We are excited to partner with Axis Bank to provide our users an option to create and transact using @axl handle on PhonePe. Our platform now enables the users to choose between multiple handles for their UPI transactions on the multi-bank model. This partnership with Axis Bank will ensure greater business continuity for both our customers and merchant partners, making their transaction experience seamless.”

PhonePe launches ESOPs worth $200 m for its employees

“This collaboration with PhonePe strengthens our commitment towards digitisation of the Indian payment ecosystem. It will help expand our reach to customers and the merchant community while offering secure and seamless payment experiences,” Sanjeev Moghe, EVP & Head – Cards & Payments, Axis Bank, said.

PhonePe had emerged as the top UPI app in January, processing 968.72 million transactions worth ₹1.92 trillion, according to data by National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).

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