Online payments service provider PayU is aggressively looking at the credit space with a target to disburse $1 billion worth of loans in the next three years, according to a senior executive.
"We are growing 25 percent month over month. We have launched larger loans which are personal loans and EMI and my objective is three years from now, we need to be doing $1 billion (origination)," Siddhartha Jajodia, global head of credit business, PayU told Moneycontrol in an interaction.
PayU, owned by Africa's Naspers, is a payments gateway firm that ventured into the credit segment with the launch of its credit business -- LazyPay in April 2017. LazyPay was started as a deferred payments product which allowed users to buy now and pay later on online fashion portals, ticket booking websites, food ordering portals etc.
However now, the company has launched multiple offerings under the same brand name. Under LazyPay, PayU now also offers personal loans and EMIs. PayU also got an NBFC licence starting January and it has been lending from its balance sheet since then.
It claims to have disbursed at least 20 million loans since the launch of its credit business.
Many companies in India are seeing credit as the next growth driver in the fintech industry given the scanty size of credit card adoption. In India barely 35-40 million credit cards are expected to have been issued. According to multiple estimates, less than 10 percent of Indians having access to formal means of credit.
Earlier this month online payments firm and also PayU's rival Paytm partnered with Citi bank to launch its credit cards, while ride hailing service provider Ola partnered with public lender State Bank of India to launch Ola Money credit card, which depicts the importance of the lending segment. Ola plans to issue atleast 10 million credit cards by the end of 2022.
The idea is to leverage from the big data these digital companies manage to accumulate by reading the usage pattern of their consumers to power credit.
India is a highly under-penetrated market for digital payments with just over 10 percent of personal consumption expenditure being transacted digitally and Indian digital payments are expected to touch $1 trillion by 2023.
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