Axis Bank partners with BharatPe to expand its merchant acquiring business

As a part of this strategic alliance, Axis Bank will be the acquiring bank for BharatPe’s POS business (BharatSwipe) and will empower acceptance of credit and debit card payments for BharatPe’s merchants using BharatSwipe.

This association will help BharatPe enhance merchant experience by leveraging the best-in-class technology platform offered by Axis Bank. Merchants can now enjoy faster payment processing, a more secured and simplified platform, along with a host of other features.

Axis Bank today is the third largest POS acquiring bank in the payments acceptance business in India. With an Installed Base of over 6,52,026 POS terminals spread across India in the metro, urban, rural and even deep geo cities such as Barmer, Ratlam, Korba etc, serving both big and small merchants, the Bank currently processes around   Rs.19,000 Cr of volumes per month. 

With superior technological capabilities for faster and secure payment processing, Axis Bank is in a position to serve all partners and customers to leverage the same for accepting payments through multiple payment modes. 

BharatPe launched its POS machine, BharatSwipe, last year as India’s first zero rental and zero MDR POS machine. It received an overwhelming response from small merchants and kirana store owners.

The BharatSwipe business has scaled up rapidly, and now contributes 20% to the overall payments Transaction Processed Value (TPV) of the company.

BharatPe has an installed base of over 1 lac POS machines across 16 cities in the country and facilitates transactions of over Rs. 1400 crores every month. BharatPe clocked annualized transaction value of US$2bn on the POS terminals at the end of FY21 and has set a target of US$6 bn in annualized TPV by the end of FY22.

Commenting on the partnership, Sanjeev Moghe, EVP & Head- Cards & Payments, Axis Bank said, “We have been continuously working on partnership led models & digital solutions to expand our offerings to the merchant community. In this endeavour, we are delighted to partner with BharatPe, one of the fastest growing fintech brands in the country. This partnership aids our commitment to drive digital adoption across the ecosystem and achieve the goal of financial inclusion by bringing technological access for digital payments to all segments of society. Further, we look forward to partnering with other fintech and e-commerce players to help them ensure merchant stickiness on their QR code installations by providing co-branded POS plus QR and several other value-added services.”

Speaking on the association, Suhail Sameer, Chief Executive Officer, BharatPe said, “We have witnessed phenomenal growth in our POS business since its launch. We have set aggressive plans for the vertical and aim to enable 5 crore transactions and scale the POS business by 3x in the next 12 months. We are targeting tripling our POS deployment to 3 lac machines by the end of current fiscal. We are also looking at expanding our reach by 5x to 80 cities in the country.  We are also working towards rolling out customer credit offerings as well as add loyalty and rewards features to our POS devices in the coming months. In order to achieve these, we will be exploring partnerships with banking and financial institutions that can empower our offering. We believe that Axis Bank is amongst the ‘digitally- ahead’ banks in the country and we are confident that this partnership will be not only help us deliver a seamless offering to our merchants, but also be instrumental in our journey to achieve the next level of growth. We look forward to a more holistic association with them in the times to come.”