Ashneer Grover, the former founder, managing director, and CEO of BharatPe, has accused the merchant payments platform’s new CEO Suhail Sameer of taking credit for the gold loan vertical Grover launched. Grover stated that he hired Nikhilesh Govil, the head of BharatPe’s gold loan division, as in almost a year ago to launch and scale this vertical. He also claims that he and Nikhilesh launched the vertical six months ago and that it has since expanded to three cities: Delhi, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad.
According to Grover, “BharatPe has today peddled another lie that they’ve launched Gold Loan under Suhail. I had brought Nikhilesh (ex-colleague from Kotak, PCJ) 1 year back to [a] build Gold Loan business. The Gold Loan business was launched by me and Nikhilesh 6 months back and expanded to 3 cities – Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Suhail had no contribution [sic] and is selling lies as he hasn’t been able to launch even things which I had planned in [the] last 3 months.”
Bharat Pe’s sportsperson announced that, “As part of BharatPe growth journey, we officially announced our foray into gold loan yesterday. The product was in beta mode over the course of the last few months and is now officially available for all merchant partners in Delhi NCR, Bangalore and Hyderabad. We do not intend to respond to baseless allegations.”
On Monday, BharatPe announced its gold loan vertical for merchant partners, marking their entry into the secured loans category. Previously, the company offered collateral-free loans in the unsecured loan category.
The company has partnered with RBI-approved non-banking financial institutions to provide gold loans of up to 20 lakhs. In a statement, the company stated that it has already launched the gold loan offering in Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad.
It plans to expand the products to 20 cities by the end of 2022. The company intends to facilitate disbursements of 500 crore by the end of 2022, at a monthly interest rate of 0.39 percent. The loan application process is entirely digital, and the loan is disbursed within 30 minutes of the evaluation process’s completion.
