Snapdeal acquires majority stake in RupeePower; Forays into Financial Services

Snapdeal, an online marketplace today announced its foray into financial services with the acquisition of a majority stake in RupeePower, a leading 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 endeavor to digitally organize 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. Snapdeal’ s nationwide reach to consumers, robust technology platform and deep consumer insights, with RupeePower’s deep technical integrations in information systems of the financial services industry will create a powerful combination.

Commenting on this, Kunal Bahl, Co-Founder & CEO, Snapdeal said, “Our aim is to create life changing experiences for our buyers and sellers and all our efforts at Snapdeal are in line with meeting this objective. Realizing the various difficulties that consumers face while deciding and purchasing financial products/services and the challenges that companies face whilst reaching out to the ‘right’ audience, we have brought RupeePower into our family, to help solve the distribution challenges of the financial services ecosystem and make it more inclusive. The same way Snapdeal has democratised retail in India, now we aspire to democratise access to credit.”

Founded in 2011, RupeePower has enabled INR 1,500 crores of credit disbursal through its platform in the current financial.  “The share of digital origination of credit is poised to grow from today’s 7.5% to 40% over the next 4 years, in an INR 400,000 crore (USD 67bn) retail credit market growing at 20% annually. With this investment and by partnering with Snapdeal, we aim to become the #1 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 & a super-simplified loan process, while ensuring lower opex & smarter credit match for lenders.” said Tejasvi Mohanram, Founder & CEO, RupeePower.

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 2 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-funneled and offered to customers as exclusive financial products/services offers on Snapdeal.