Ashneer Grover attacks BharatPe, claims gold loan segment his brainchild

Airing a new controversy, BharatPe’s former co-founder and managing director  Ashneer Grover has alleged that the company has “peddled another lie” of launching the gold loan segment under the CEO Suhail Sameer.

He accused Suhail Sameer of taking undue credit for the new gold loan segment launched by BharatPe, claiming that the vertical was launched by him and Nikhilesh Govil six months back, and expanded to three cities.

“BharatPe has today peddled another lie that they've launched Gold Loan under Suhail. I had brought Nikhilesh (ex-colleague from Kotak, PCJ) 1 year back to build Gold Loan business. The Gold Loan business was launched by me and Nikhilesh 6 months back and expanded to 3 cities - Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad. Suhail had no contribution and is selling lies as he hasn't been able to launch even things which I had planned in last 3 months,” Ashneer Grover said in a statement.

Crisis-ridden fintech player BharatPe entered the gold loan segment for its merchant partners and marked its entry into the secured credit category. The company was recently surrounded by a controversy that led to founder Ashneer Grover’s suspension. It is also under various probes by enforcement agencies.

BharatPe said in a statement that it has partnered with a few Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs), and will be offering loans of up to Rs 20 lakh against gold pledge.

According to the company, the service is already available to its merchant customers in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and it will be scaling this to 20 cities by the end of this year when it hopes to disburse Rs 500 crore, BharatPe said in a statement on Monday.

Its interest rate at the lowest band is 0.39 per cent per month, working out to be 4.7 per cent per annum. The loan application and disbursal are all done digitally within 30 minutes.