PremiumGoogle-incubated fintech player Financepeer is planning to double the numbers of schools/colleges it taps to 9,000 by December and also grow its loan book two-fold to ₹1,000 crore
MUMBAI : Google-incubated fintech player Financepeer, which provides interest-free tuition fees to parents of school and college-going students, is planning to double the numbers of schools/colleges it taps to 9,000 by December and also grow its loan book two-fold to ₹1,000 crore.
Co-founder Sunit Gajbhiye, who started the company in 2017, claimed that serving around 4,500 schools/colleges, universities and coaching centres makes Financepeer the largest in this segment.
Its immediate competition includes Avanse Financial Services, Grayquest Education Finance and Eduvance, among others.
Of the 4,500 institutions, over 3,000 are schools and coaching centres and a good number of them came on board during the first seven months of the lockdown, he said.
Some of the top school chains which it serves include the Delhi Public School, GEMS Education, Birla Open Minds and Orchids, he said.
During the first seven months of the pandemic, the company added over 1 million users/parents as they were without income or faced pay-cuts.
"Since we started operations in 2017, we provided loans to 1.5 million students. We plan to double the number of schools/institutions to 9,000 by the end of the year and expect to double the loan book from a likely ₹500 crore by this April," Gajbhiye told PTI.
While for the parents, the loan comes at zero additional cost, Financepeer collects an upfront 5 per cent in commission/fee from the school, which gets the whole fee paid in the beginning of the academic year, Gajbhiye said, explaining his business model.
Parents can pay back in five-nine EMIs with no interest, he said, adding however, the number of EMIs is fixed by the school.
Parents also get rewarded by group health insurance covering accidents, cash-back offers through vouchers and online courses payments, among other benefits, which has ensured that more than 95 per cent of parents stay back with it.
So far this academic year, as many as 30,000 parents availed of the insurance facility, he said.
On the asset quality, he said, NPA is a negligible 0.07% this current academic year as only around 15 parents have defaulted.
He said margins vary from 1.5-3% and the average loan is ₹75,000-80,000 per student.
The city-based company, which has raised USD 4 million external funding, has six other offices in Pune, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai and Dehradun, and employs 180 people.
