Axis Bank partners with BharatPe to expand its merchant acquiring business

Press Release

• 01-09-2021

Mumbai : In a strategic move to expand its merchant acquiring business, Axis Bank, India’s third largest private sector bank has partnered with BharatPe, India’s leading fintech company for merchants. As a part of this strategic alliance, Axis Bank will be the acquiring bank for BharatPe’s POS business (BharatSwipe) and will empower acceptance of credit and debit card payments for BharatPe’s merchants using BharatSwipe. 

This association will help BharatPe enhance merchant experience by leveraging the best-in-class technology platform offered by Axis Bank. Merchants can now enjoy faster payment processing, a more secured and simplified platform, along with a host of other features.

Axis Bank today is the third largest POS acquiring bank in the payments acceptance business in India. With an Installed Base of over 6,52,026 POS terminals spread across India in the metro, urban, rural and even deep geo cities such as Barmer, Ratlam, Korba etc, serving both big and small merchants, the Bank currently processes around   Rs.19,000 Cr of volumes per month.  With superior technological capabilities for faster and secure payment processing, Axis Bank is in a position to serve all partners and customers to leverage the same for accepting payments through multiple payment modes.  

BharatPe launched its POS machine, BharatSwipe, last year as India’s first zero rental and zero MDR POS machine. It received an overwhelming response from small merchants and kirana store owners. The BharatSwipe business has scaled up rapidly, and now contributes 20% to the overall payments Transaction Processed Value (TPV) of the company. BharatPe has an installed base of over 1 lac POS machines across 16 cities in the country and facilitates transactions of over Rs. 1400 crores every month. BharatPe clocked annualized transaction value of US$2bn on the POS terminals at the end of FY21 and has set a target of US$6 bn in annualized TPV by the end of FY22.

Commenting on the partnership, Sanjeev Moghe, EVP & Head- Cards & Payments, Axis Bank said, “We have been continuously working on partnership led models & digital solutions to expand our offerings to the merchant community. In this endeavour, we are delighted to partner with BharatPe, one of the fastest growing fintech brands in the country. This partnership aids our commitment to drive digital adoption across the ecosystem and achieve the goal of financial inclusion by bringing technological access for digital payments to all segments of society. Further, we look forward to partnering with other fintech and e-commerce players to help them ensure merchant stickiness on their QR code installations by providing co-branded POS plus QR and several other value-added services”

Speaking on the association, Suhail Sameer, Chief Executive Officer, BharatPe said, “We have witnessed phenomenal growth in our POS business since its launch. We have set aggressive plans for the vertical and aim to enable 5 crore transactions and scale the POS business by 3x in the next 12 months. We are targeting tripling our POS deployment to 3 lac machines by the end of current fiscal. We are also looking at expanding our reach by 5x to 80 cities in the country.  We are also working towards rolling out customer credit offerings as well as add loyalty and rewards features to our POS devices in the coming months. In order to achieve these, we will be exploring partnerships with banking and financial institutions that can empower our offering. We believe that Axis Bank is amongst the ‘digitally- ahead’ banks in the country and we are confident that this partnership will be not only help us deliver a seamless offering to our merchants, but also be instrumental in our journey to achieve the next level of growth. We look forward to a more holistic association with them in the times to come.”

BharatSwipe also allows merchants to accept QR payments, via dynamic QR generated on the Swipe machine. Also, its feature of generating physical receipts for QR payments is one of the most sought feature. The company has also recently launched a ‘holiday settlements’ feature for its merchant partners. This feature allows merchants to accept settlements even on a bank holiday, thereby ensuring liquidity at all times.

BharatPe is India’s largest fintech company that offers a range of financial technology products for SMEs, small merchants and kirana store owners. It has been committed to drive financial inclusion in the country with India’s first UPI QR payment acceptance product with zero transaction fees, a range of loans for the underserved and the unexplored merchants as well as SMEs, and zero rental card acceptance machines. It will continue to scale its lending and payments business as well as expand its presence to newer markets in FY22. The company aspires to become a Digital Bank for all SMEs in the country.  It has set a target of reaching US$30 billion TPV annually on payments (both QR and Swipe) and building a loan book of $700 million with small merchants by March 2023.

About Axis Bank:  

Axis Bank is the third largest private sector bank in India. Axis Bank offers the entire spectrum of services to customer segments covering Large and Mid-Corporates, SME, Agriculture and Retail Businesses. With its 4,600 domestic branches (including extension counters) and 11,061 ATMs across the country as on 30th June 2021, the network of Axis Bank spreads across 2,628 centers, enabling the Bank to reach out to a large cross-section of customers with an array of products and services. The Axis Group includes Axis Mutual Fund, Axis Securities Ltd., Axis Finance, Axis Trustee, Axis Capital, A.TReDS Ltd., Freecharge and Axis Bank Foundation. For further information on Axis Bank, please refer to the website: https://www.axisbank.com

About BharatPe

BharatPe was co-founded by Ashneer Grover and Shashvat Nakrani in 2018 with the vision of making financial inclusion a reality for Indian merchants. In 2018, BharatPe launched India’s first UPI interoperable QR code, the first zero MDR payment acceptance service. In 2020, post-Covid, BharatPe also launched India’s only zero MDR card acceptance terminals – BharatSwipe. Currently serving over 70 lakh merchants across 140+ cities, the company is a leader in UPI offline transactions, processing 11 crores+ UPI transactions per month (annualized Transaction Processed Value of US$ 10+ Bn). The company has already facilitated disbursement of loans totaling to over Rs. 2,200 crores to its merchants, since launch. BharatPe’s POS business processes payments of over Rs. 1,400 crores/ month. BharatPe has raised close to US$ 600 million in equity and debt, till date. The company’s list of marquee investors includes Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Steadview Capital, Beenext, Amplo and Sequoia Capital.  In June 2021, the company announced the acquisition of PAYBACK India, the country’s largest multi-brand loyalty program company with 100 million+ members. In June 2021, it was also given an in-principle approval by Reserve Bank of India to establish a Small Finance Bank, in partnership with Centrum Financial Services Limited (Centrum), the established and profitable NBFC arm of the Centrum Group.

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