PayU Monedo will provide cardless EMIs (equated monthly installments) to finance the online purchases of consumers in India. The new offering follows the launch of a strategic partnership between PayU and Kreditech announced in May 2017 to deliver a joint proposition for cardless EMI. The partnership saw EUR 110 million investment from PayU in Kreditech - the largest ever equity investment in a German fintech company.

With PayU Monedo, PayU and Kreditech aim to bridge the credit gap for the banked and underbanked population in India by offering instant short and medium-term shopping credits for their cart amount at the checkout of popular e-commerce websites. PayU Monedo combines PayU’s massive 300,000+ merchant distribution network with Kreditech’s expert machine learning-based real-time underwriting capabilities and its lending-as-a service platform Monedo. This integration allows customers to receive credit in less than two minutes for their online purchases at charges comparable to local banks. Loan amounts are granted at up to 2K USD. The duration of the credit line and interest rates for cardless EMI are dynamic and entirely dependent on the likeliness of the individual customer & the merchants to repay the loan.

After the goods are added to the cart, the consumer is offered an option to select cardless EMI as the payment method at checkout. Using its innovative scoring technology combined with stateof the art fraud and eKYC verification process, Kreditech performs a precise credit rating and offers competitive pricing and repayment options. The credit decision requires no manual intervention and is issued in less than two minutes, thus eliminating cumbersome and lengthy procedures. Consumers can also choose from various flexible repayment options, selecting the mode most convenient to them.

By making goods and services affordable for consumers with lower purchasing power, PayU Monedo enables merchants to expand their business to completely new market segments with the chance of significantly higher sales and lower cart abandonment rates.

“Our newest consumer offering of cardless EMI in partnership with Kreditech bridges the underlying gap for credit,” says Shailaz Nag, MD & Co-founder, PayU India. “PayU’s goal is to offer more shopping opportunities to those who, for various reasons have no access to credit. We help online shoppers to buy the latest mobile phones, laptops, consumer durables & much more on easy EMI without a credit card. PayU Monedo is easy to use, quick and offers flexibility. We are already talking to merchants in the e-commerce, travel and other online sectors and are looking forward to providing this innovative technology as an alternative payment method in the checkout process,” he further added.

“Both PayU and Kreditech share the same mission to increase the financial freedom of people with limited access to banking services”, states Alexander Graubner-Müller, CEO at Kreditech. “At Kreditech, we have developed a proprietary credit scoring technology which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to assess an applicant’s creditworthiness in seconds and with higher precision than traditional credit-bureau based systems. By teaming up with PayU, we are going to offer attractive loans to individual consumers with flexible terms of repayment. This is the first partnership between a payment provider and an alternative lending company and we are thrilled to have kicked-off our joint business in India. We are bullish about our foray in India and will be setting up an office in Mumbai.”

Kreditech India will be operated out of the Mumbai office led by Ashish Kohli as country-manager, bringing a total 20 years of experience in financial services with Citibank and Bajaj Finance.