Infibeam Avenues, a digital payments and enterprise software company, announced ambitions to join the lending sector on Tuesday, as digital usage among businesses, especially retailers, continues to surge across the country. To facilitate loans to its over 3 million merchants, the business stated it would form strategic partnerships with banks and non-banking financial corporations (NBFCs). Infibeam announced its Q1 FY22 consolidated results, saying, "We want to do financing as an enabler by offering credit algorithm, credit platform, frameworks, and merchant database".
“We will provide the technology, while banks and NBFCs would take on the credit risk. We have a large database of direct merchants, which includes MSMEs, factoring companies, small enterprises, corporations, public banks, governments, aviation companies, and online platforms, among others. According to Srikanth Rajagopalan, President, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations, Infibeam Avenues, “Technically, we can support all the merchants on our platform through banks and NBFCs.”
Last year, Infibeam had started lending on an express settlement basis for select merchants, and for the entire FY21, Rajagopalan said only $100-million lending was done out of a total payment value of $14 billion to test the lending business. Last quarter, the company had crossed $200 million as well. “This will be a profit driver for the company as our cost is negligible,” he added.
Infibeam’s core payment gateway solution CCAvenue provides close to 200 payment options to the merchants allowing them to accept payments in 27 currencies. Infibeam Avenues’ enterprise software platform BillAvenue had processed transactions worth $19 billion in FY21 for its over 2.5 million clients across digital payments and enterprise software platforms. “With current transaction processing value of Rs 50,000 crore per quarter and millions of full KYC merchants on our platform, the AI-driven lending opportunity is the future growth and margin driver for IAL (Infibeam Avenues Limited),” Vishal Mehta, Managing Director, Infibeam Avenues said in a statement.
The company reported a 14 per cent year-on-year (YoY) growth in profit after tax (PAT) to Rs 13 crore while gross revenue was up 120 per cent YoY to Rs 216 crore. Transaction processed value also increased 170 per cent YoY to Rs 50,651 crore. The payment gateway solution processes around $18 billion payments while its software platform enables another $10 billion worth of transactions annually. “If this trend continues, where people, institutions, and organizations are adopting digitalization at such a faster pace, Infibeam Avenues may soon be processing more than $100 billion transactions,” the company said.
