Fullerton India partners with Paytm to expand digital lending to MSMEs

Mumbai, Jan 24: Fullerton India and One97 Communications Limited, that owns the brand Paytm, have announced a partnership to provide lending products to merchant partners and consumers. With the partnership, the two established institutions will leverage data-driven insights and wide reach to bring credit to new-to-credit users. The programme will offer Paytm Postpaid (buy-now-pay-later) to millions of consumers on the Paytm platform while utilizing Fullerton’s deep risk assessment capabilities and scale. Fullerton India and Paytm will further expand their product offerings to include instant personal loans, which are end-to-end digitally originated and disbursed using Paytm’s technology and Fullerton’s pan India presence. Leveraging Paytm’s deep insights and engagement with merchants, the partnership will also offer merchant loans across the country. The two institutions would establish a wide network, specifically catering to MSMEs across small cities and towns and help them grow their business. They aim to co-create innovative merchant loan products using customer payment behaviour and Fullerton’s years of experience of understanding of this segment. Bhavesh Gupta, CEO, Paytm Lending said, “We have seen great adoption of the lending products among consumers and merchants on our platform. We believe that there is a massive opportunity to provide access to credit to merchants in small cities and towns. We continue to solely focus on helping our blue-chip lending partners, to bring seamless credit products to our customers and merchants. Consumer credit has been growing exponentially through products like Paytm Postpaid and Personal Loans, which we believe can be further expanded through our partnership with Fullerton India.” Shantanu Mitra, CEO & MD of Fullerton India, said, “We at Fullerton India believe that buy-now-pay-later is the present and, in the future, too, will continue to offer tremendous opportunities to drive exponential growth in digital lending across customer segments.”