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Snapdeal acquires majority stake in RupeePower
With this, the e-commerce company has got into the financial services sector.
Snapdeal has announced its foray into financial services with the acquisition of a majority stake in RupeePower, a digital financial products distribution platform.
Snapdeal will now offer consumers a financial services marketplace - a first-of-its-kind initiative in the e-commerce industry. Through this marketplace, Snapdeal and RupeePower will endeavour to digitally organise the fragmented financial services market, by integrating these services onto the Snapdeal platform.
RupeePower is a digital distribution platform for loans, credit cards and other personal finance products. With its credit comparison, matching and processing infrastructure and strong affiliation with banks and NBFCs, RupeePower will now join forces with Snapdeal in building a collaborative ecosystem to provide customers with a host of financial products.
Founded in 2011, RupeePower has enabled INR 1,500 crore of credit disbursal through its platform in the current financial.
RupeePower is a pure digital financial distribution platform and marketplace, matching borrowers and lenders in the retail loans space for loan products like credit cards, personal loans, home loans, auto loans and consumer loans. Customers are shown the best loan and card offers for comparison and further matched with the bank's criteria. The service is free for customers and the company gets paid by the financial institution, upon loan disbursal. The company is not a lender in itself and does not compete with its partner banks and NBFCs in the lending space.
Tejasvi Mohanram, founder & CEO, RupeePower, says, "The share of digital origination of credit is poised to grow from today's 7.5 per cent to 40 per cent, over the next four years, in an INR 400,000 crore (USD 67bn) retail credit market, growing at 20 per cent annually. With this investment and by partnering with Snapdeal, we aim to become the top originator of financial products over the next couple of years. Our emphasis will be on scaling RupeePower into the top match-making platform between lenders and borrowers, providing consumers with the best targeted offers and a super-simplified loan process, while ensuring lower operational expenditures and smarter credit match for lenders."
The marketplace will include a wide range of financial services like personal loans, educational loans, credit cards (co-brand - B2B & B2C), auto loans, home loans and extended warranties, amongst others.
With this launch, financial services companies will now be able to leverage Snapdeal's nationwide reach across 5000+ towns and cities. Often resolving to following up on cold leads, these companies will be able to market and target their products and services to a captive audience on Snapdeal, implying higher conversion vis-à-vis the traditional offline channels.
Also, currently, these companies face the challenge of limited reach in tier II and beyond towns and cities. The collaboration between Snapdeal and RupeePower, through the launch of this financial services marketplace, will help them overcome this challenge with a cost and effort efficient marketplace platform. The benefits thus realised by the financial services companies, will be re-funnelled and offered to customers as exclusive financial products/services offers on Snapdeal.