Digital payments and enterprise software company Infibeam Avenues on Tuesday announced plans to enter the lending market as digital adoption continues to grow among businesses including merchants across the country. The company said it would enter into strategic tie-ups with banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) to enable lending targeting its over 3 million merchants. “We intend to do lending as an enabler by offering credit algorithm, credit platform, frameworks, and merchant database,” Infibeam said announcing its Q1 FY22 consolidated results.
“We are the technology enabler while banks and NBFCs will take the credit exposure. We have a huge database of direct merchants including MSMEs, factoring businesses, small businesses, corporates, public banks, governments, aviation businesses, online platforms, etc. Technically we can support all the merchants on our platform through banks and NBFCs,” Srikanth Rajagopalan, President, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations, Infibeam Avenues told Financial Express Online.
Last year, Infibeam had started lending on an express settlement basis for select merchants, and for the entire FY21, Rajagopalan said only $100-million lending was done out of a total payment value of $14 billion to test the lending business. Last quarter, the company had crossed $200 million as well. “This will be a profit driver for the company as our cost is negligible,” he added.
Infibeam’s core payment gateway solution CCAvenue provides close to 200 payment options to the merchants allowing them to accept payments in 27 currencies. Infibeam Avenues’ enterprise software platform BillAvenue had processed transactions worth $19 billion in FY21 for its over 2.5 million clients across digital payments and enterprise software platforms. “With current transaction processing value of Rs 50,000 crore per quarter and millions of full KYC merchants on our platform, the AI-driven lending opportunity is the future growth and margin driver for IAL (Infibeam Avenues Limited),” Vishal Mehta, Managing Director, Infibeam Avenues said in a statement.
The company reported a 14 per cent year-on-year (YoY) growth in profit after tax (PAT) to Rs 13 crore while gross revenue was up 120 per cent YoY to Rs 216 crore. Transaction processed value also increased 170 per cent YoY to Rs 50,651 crore. The payment gateway solution processes around $18 billion payments while its software platform enables another $10 billion worth of transactions annually. “If this trend continues, where people, institutions, and organizations are adopting digitalization at such a faster pace, Infibeam Avenues may soon be processing more than $100 billion transactions,” the company said.
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