The Shopkeeper's Best Friend

BharatPe has the shopkeeper at the centre of its fintech universe. This has paid rich dividends, with more than 6 million merchant partners and loans worth ₹1,600 crore in less than three years. All thanks to QR codes.

- ABHIK SEN

ASHNEER GROVER • 39

SHASHVAT NAKRANI • 22

CO-FOUNDERS, BHARATPE

SHOPKEEPERS IN INDIA ARE a harried lot. Events like the Covid-19 pandemic usually hit mom-and-pop or Kirana stores the hardest; margins are shrinking every other day. And despite offering credit to their customers, when it’s time for them to invest in their business, the friendly neighbourhood merchant has little to no options in the formal sector.

“Small shops in India solve hundreds of problems. But the shopkeeper has to borrow from friends or loan sharks for capital as banks won’t give him a loan as he has no papers,” says Ashneer Grover, 39, co-founder and CEO of BharatPe, a New Delhi-based fintech startup. And it wasn’t just limited to loans. Or the pandemic. Since India’s digital renaissance in 2016, fintech companies like Paytm and PhonePe have focussed on payments, but zeroed in on the customer by spending boatloads on incentives such as cashbacks to sign them up. It was left to a student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, to focus on the other side of the equation—the shopkeeper.

“During my IIT days [around 2017-2018] I was working on a startup. It is then that I identified a huge problem faced by merchants/SMEs—the challenge of accepting payments digitally without losing out on margins,” says BharatPe co-founder Shashvat Nakrani, 22. SMEs, he says, are the backbone of the Indian economy and one of the most underserved segments.