KreditBee Teams With PayU to Offer Cardless Installment Payments

Indian lender KreditBee has teamed with PayU to let consumers pay for purchases in installments.

The partnership, announced Wednesday (March 22), lets PayU merchants work with KreditBee’s customers to turn their purchases into cardless EMIs (equated monthly installments) that they’ll pay back over a series of three to 18 months.

In a news release provided to PYMNTS, KreditBee Co-founder and CEO Madhusudan Ekambaram said the partnership with PayU — which offers financial services for emerging markets — will “contribute to the country’s digitalization and financial inclusion imperative.”

Founded in 2018, KreditBee aims to help underserved populations that don’t have access to traditional lending products. In addition to its cardless EMI offering, the company also offers personal loans, online and offline checkout finance, and plans to begin offering financial services such as insurance and credit score reports.

PYMNTS spoke with Pay Global Payments CEO Mario Shiliashki late last year about efforts to bring financial services to underserved populations and move them beyond cash-based transactions. It’s something he said will take full-scale collaborations between traditional and nontraditional financial services players and regulators.

For the 1.7 billion consumers who are considered unbanked and underbanked and the 200 million small businesses in the same boat, financial inclusion requires more than just technology, but rather “takes an ecosystem,” Shiliashki told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster.

And that ecosystem can only take come together as regulators begin to expand their frameworks overseeing data collection and use. He argued that it isn’t just the FinTechs that are innovating new products and services to meet consumers’ needs.

“Banks are trying not just to catch up, but to collaborate with FinTechs to provide better services,” said Shiliashki

These joint efforts make it easier for individuals and businesses to set up new accounts that are backed by banks while not necessarily being “run” by banks, he said. The transaction accounts become the springboard for new services and experiences.

“Standards need to catch up in order to also increase the adoption of these services and the ability for FinTech to scale,” Shiliashki told Webster, which sets the stage for mass adoption of new offerings.

He added that PayU has been investing in payments innovation for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and in new consumer-facing credit solutions. No matter the product or service being offered, he said, user experience is crucial.

“As an industry, we’ve made tremendous strides in making the experience better, but we are still not where we need to be, especially in emerging markets,” Shiliashki said.