After stabilizing its business operations, homegrown e-commerce marketplace Flipkart is now looking forward to expand its offerings. In line with this, reports suggests that the company is planning to start selling financial services and products.
The report says that the company has created a focused team for financial services and products. However, it is said that Flipkart has been planning for this since August last year. It was in talks with banks to offer loan products to customers, especially during its `Big Billion Day’ sale.
A person aware of the matter said to ET:
While several ecommerce companies are looking at financial products, Flipkart is leading the pack and is keen to launch this as a revenue-generating business and also to help its customers.
Monomita Roy Avasarala is the lead product manager for fintech and consumer credit products at Flipkart. One of the persons aware of the development said that many startups are in talks with Flipkart executives including Monomita.
Her LinkedIn profile says that she “launched the ‘No Cost EMI’ product (creating a marketplace of lenders, brands, and consumers) on Flipkart to drive affordability and increase sales of high-ticket-size items”. Further she also adds that she is also “working to extend credit and convenience features to a larger customer base with innovations such as `Flipkart Pay Later’, and is leveraging machine learning algorithms to build the next generation of credit products”.
The company is already offering access to loans to sellers on its platform in partnerships with banks and non-banking finance companies (NBFCs). Last year, it tied up with Axis Bank to launch a credit card with discount benefits.
Apart from credit and loans, Flipkart is also looking at mutual funds and insurance products. However, some experts said the margins through such tie-ups could be low for Flipkart, but the company can make up through large volumes.
This new comes at a time when Paytm, the leading payments service provider in India, has also recently launched its payments bank, and is set to partner with various lenders and insurance companies to offer financial services to customers.
