SlicePay, a fintech startup which provides buy-now-pay-later kind of service to its users, has today announced that it has acquired Trustio, a NewDelhi-based peer-to-peer lending company.
Trustio provided alumni-backed loans to students and recent graduates. It was backed by Axilor Ventures and Zostel CEO Dharamveer Singh Chouhan. The deal is said to be an all equity deal. As a part of this acquisition deal, the founders of Trustio will be joining the core team at SlicePay. This also marks SlicePay’s first acquisition in the market.
As per the company, this transaction will enhance its team strength, product capabilities and enrich its data science driven risk engine. It is now working towards a broader aim of building an infrastructure that can support the rapid 18% WoW growth it is seeing, since the last two quarters.
The company has also recently tied up with a systemically important large NBFC which has a 2500+ crore loan book and are in the final stages of discussions with a publically traded NBFC that has 10,000+ cr book. Rajan Bajaj, co-founder at Slicepay, said:
We have been getting many inbounds from NBFCs over the last few months as we have established that there is a huge market of new to credit customers, that can be served economically. We have seen multiple cycles of credit disbursal and have been consistently maintaining NPAs under 0.8% which is very encouraging for a debt investor.
Pranay Bhardwaj, CEO and cofounder of Trustio, said,
Scaling a peer 2 peer lending model was incredibly tough and I was looking out for synergies with other people in this space who had a better solution to the student credit problem we were trying to solve. I got in touch with almost all the fintech companies in this space, and was impressed with the product market fit that SlicePay has found. We finally decided to join the SlicePay team as we had very similar philosophy focused on cost effective distribution & data driven risk management that is a must have for this business.
Founded in 2015 by Rajan Bajaj and Deepak Malhotra, SlicePay provides credit line of up to Rs 60,000 to college students based in Bangalore and Chennai through their proprietary risk mechanism. The final loan disbursal is done by one of the two consumer lending NBFCs they work with.
