BharatPe Case Study: Business, Marketing Strategy & Success Story
- Last Updated December 15, 2023
Suraj Shrivastava
Chief Link Building Strategist
Chief Link Building Strategist
BharatPe is an Indian fintech company. That provides a single platform for various digital payments. It focuses on small merchants and Kirana store owners in India.
It provides solutions for UPI payments, card acceptance, small business funding, and others. It helps small merchants to carry out transactions through UPI (Unified Payments Interface) for free using QR Codes.
Much before the establishment of this company, most companies were having a closed ecosystem, where the merchants had to use different QR Codes to receive payments through different payment gateways.
Every payment gateway used to charge more than 1% of the commission. The merchants and SMEs accepted payments by paying some commission, which had become a great problem.
So BharatPe founders thought of addressing this problem and providing a single QR Code for different payment gateways like Paytm, PhonePe, Google Pay, BHIM, and 150+ other UPIs, without any commission.
BharatPe is a QR code-based payment app for merchants, Kirana store owners, and SMEs. The app allows the user to accept UPI payments. Through a single QR code of BharatPe without any commission. The app also facilitates easy card acceptance and small business financing. Bharat even offers loans to the merchants up to Rs.7 lacs which the merchant can avail of for 3-12 months.
The BharatPe app allows a quick sign-in procedure. And an instant receipt of funds into the bank account of the user. The merchant repays the loan amount in easy installments. BharatPe processes loans worth Rs. 300 crore every month. It has plans to launch secured lending products for merchants, like gold loans and auto loans.
NOTE: With the resignation of Ashneer Grover on February 28, 2022, BharatPe lists Bhavik Koladiya and Shashvat Nakrani as its co-founders.
Full name: Ashneer Grover
Till his resignation on 28 February 2022, he served as the MD and co-founder of BharatPe. He holds a BTech degree in Civil Engineering from IIT Delhi and an MBA degree from IIM Ahmedabad. Hailing from South Delhi, he headed Corp Dev from Amex India. He also served as the CFO of Grofers, an instant delivery service provider. He features in the Indian show “Shark Tank India” like a shark and gets paid Rs. 10 lakh per episode.
Full name: Bhavikkumar H.Koladiya (Nickname: Bob Patel)
He is the co-founder and Group Head of The Product and Technology area of BharatPe. He is an “Angel Investor” in many popular IT companies in India. Like Pristyn Care, Digifin, and LenDenClub. In March 2022, both the co-founders of BharatPe came into news channels. For fighting for their stake in the company.
Full name: Shashvat Nakrani
He holds a bachelor’s degree in Textile Technology. From India’s premier institute IIT Delhi. He completed his schooling from his father’s institute in Bhavnagar, Gujarat. During his college days, he dropped out of his college in 2018. To start the UPI payment service provider, BharatPe. Shashvat Nakrani is one of the co-founders of the company. He was also named as the “youngest richest self-made individual” on IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2021.
In 2018, the two co-founders Shashvat Nakrani and Bhavik Koladiya discovered a gap in the digital payment market. The gap was the use of various QR codes by a retailer to make a digital payment.
For instance, if the retailer has a QR code for PayTm but you want to make a payment through PhonePe then you can not make the digital payment as the shopkeeper doesn’t have a QR code for PhonePe.
Before the launch of BharatPe, other payment merchant companies charged 1.5% interest on each transaction. This way the shopkeepers could not earn much profit.
So Shashvat Nakrani and Bhavik Koladiya went to Ashneer Grover for some funds. Ashneer Grover liked the ideas of the two IITians and decided to fund the launch of BharatPe.
Thus BharatPe provided a single QR code for many digital payment merchants. The merchants need not pay any commission anymore. Thus merchants joined BharatPe to stay away from paying transaction commissions. BharatPe even introduced a single-day settlement of transactions for the merchants.
To earn a good profit, the company used its Artificial Intelligence Systems. It noticed that many businesses run through huge cash intake but low-profit margins. They also found that small businesses sometimes need to take loans of less value. Which they cannot take from banks.
To solve this problem, BharatPe introduced a Merchant Lending System. Which offered merchants to take short-term loans for their operations without any collateral.
BharatPe could gather a lot of data when a merchant received a payment through Google Pay, PhonePe, and others. Using the data, BharatPe gets knowledge about the cash flow of the merchant.
Depending on the loan repayment capacity of the company, BharatPe offers a 2% interest rate on the loan provided. Ashneer Grover has made BharatPe skyrocket. The company processes loans of more than Rs. 300 crores per month. As a result, BharatPe emerged as India’s powerful payment merchant platform.
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BharatPe follows a unique marketing strategy that has helped the company reach skyrocket. Before the establishment of the company, other UPI payment platforms focused on consumers and customers.
The consumer is the buyer (generally a youth) and the customer is the QR Code which acts as a support system. So the platform had to target two different entities and had to provide cashback to two different entities. Whereas, for BharatPe its customers were its consumers. Its consumer is the merchant. Thus the company decided to provide cashback to the merchant himself.
The unique marketing strategy of the company led to two popular campaigns. They were “Ek Bharat Ek QR” and “Team BharatPe”.
BharatPe decided to select only crickets for its brand ambassadors. The makers of the campaign “Team BharatPe” realized that the cricket industry has a huge fan following.
They also found that the retail shops run cricket over their television screens. So they understood that their target audience is cricket-oriented.
The company created a priority in the minds of the merchant as well as the customers to prefer BharatPe over other digital payment platforms.
The other campaign “Ek Bharat Ek QR” gained a lot of popularity too. BharatPe assured the merchant and retailer that payments made through UPI payment gateways will reach their bank accounts Including attractive cashback.
During the pandemic lockdown, small businesses suffered great losses. After lockdown, when retailers were being asked to open up, they needed small loans which banks generally deny due to lack of collateral. With help of BharatPe, the SMEs and retail shop owners could take loans without any collateral and run their businesses again.
This unique marketing strategy has helped the company reach sky high. They have plans to open up their payment bank for which RBI has already approved the license.
BharatPe is a B2B QR code-based payments company. The company provides a single QR code. To carry out payments from various platforms like Mobikwik, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Freecharge, True Caller, and many more.
The retailers receive credits for transactions made into their bank accounts. BharatPe appointed many brand ambassadors from different industries. Let’s see multiple digital products provided by BharatPe.
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The company provides a digital payment platform to its customers by focusing on the merchant side of the business. The company has PoS machines to accept card payments. Yet the revenue of the companies comes from its merchant and consumer-based products.
BharatPe gets listed as one of the Top 5 most valued Fintech startups in India. 29 investors have invested in the company. Some of its investors are Sequoia Capital, IIFL Wealth, Tiger Global Management, Coatue, Ribbit Capital, and others. BharatPe has 8 million merchants on its platform.
Due to the controversy raised within the company. The co-founder and MD of BharatPe Ashneer Grover resigned from his services. He is the single largest individual shareholder of BharatPe. Based on the investigation reports, he was being asked to sell out his company share of 9.5% but he laid a condition that he would sell out his hard-earned shares in exchange for an investment of Rs. 4000 crores.
He has hired a Delhi NCR-based law firm Karanjawala & Co. to help him through the controversy, but on February 28, 2022, he resigned from the company himself by saying that, he is now wasting himself “fighting a long, lonely battle” against his own investors and management. He called the entire episode a “battle of egos”.
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The company has been growing since its establishment and has emerged as a powerful digital payment platform.
The process of applying for a loan through BharatPe is completely digital. The business app provides a merchant best offers, and other details before applying for a loan. Such a loan will get disbursed within 30 minutes.
The merchants can opt for loans for a duration of 6, 9, and 12 months, and then repay them through EDI (Easy Daily Instalments). The company has plans to launch an EMI option for the repayment of loans. The QR code-based loans will process with minimal paperwork.
BharatPe has installed over 1 lakh PoS machines across 16 cities in India. That supports transactions over Rs. 1400 crores per month. It has become one of the preferred digital payment platforms for SMEs, Also for Kirana store owners, restaurant owners, and other small businesses with less number of outlets.
The company claims to have disbursed loans amounting to Rs. 150 crores to its merchants during FY20. BharatPe also claims of earning Rs. 6.94 crore from its capital assets during FY20.
BharatPe has been on the radar of the Directorate General of Goods & Services Tax Intelligence (DGGI) for a long time. The governing body has been looking over the finances of BharatPe and found many loopholes within the organization.
Also, From the findings, Grover and his family have got alleged to getting engaged in extensive misappropriation of company funds and creating fake vendors.
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In 2020, the company launched “Paisa Bolega”, Which converts the merchant’s mobile into a speaker, and announces the amount of the transaction received aloud. The company recently disbursed loans amounting to Rs. 140 crores.
The company stands 3rd in the list of private POS providers. The fintech BharatPe along with the Centum Financial Services group together have plans to take over the troubled Punjab & Maharashtra Cooperative (PMC) Bank. RBI has also approved BharatPe to set up a small finance bank.
BharatPe has a unique business model. Which makes it stand out from other digital payment platforms. They provide innovative and unique products and services to their customers.
At present they have over 1 million merchants, who use the platform to carry out their transactions and take loans. BharatPe has shown us the scope for business opportunities in India. It believes that the success of a business depends upon understanding its target audiences.
BharatPe is a digital payment platform, which provides effortless carrying out of UPI transactions and digital money lending to merchants without any collateral. Through the app, a merchant can receive UPI payments through a single QR code. Called the “BharatPe code”.
In the beginning, the company got founded by Ashneer Grover, Bhavik Koladiya, and Shashvat Nakrani but due to controversies and varied allegations, Ashneer Grover had to resign from the post of MD and CEO of BharatPe on February 28, 2022.
No, BharatPe is a private fintech company.
BharatPe balance gives the user information about their daily QR usage. Also, the balance in their registered account and their available loan limit.
Suraj Shrivastava at ForgeFusion shares simple, effective ways to grow your business using SEO, content marketing, and AI, learned from helping over 50 companies. When he's not working, he loves teaching others or watching documentaries.
