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Google enters retail loan business in India

Google Pay will offer sachet loans for merchants and consumers, a move that it said would help small businesses in India.

Google Pay will offer sachet loans for merchants and consumers, a move that it said would help small businesses in India.

The Gpay application will make available a range of credit-focused products, a service for which it has tied up with banks and non-banking financial companies (NBFCs).

Sachet loans are small-ticket loans ranging from Rs 10,000 to Rs 1 lakh. They have a repayment tenure between 7 days and 12 months. 

Google Pay also enabled a credit line for merchants in partnership with ePayLater helping solve the working capital requirements of merchants. These start as low as Rs 15,000 and can be repaid with EMIs starting from Rs 111. 

The tech giant has partnered with DMI Finance to provide the loan services.

On the consumer side, Google Pay is expanding its personal loans portfolio with Axis Bank and enabling credit lines from banks on UPI in collaboration with ICICI Bank. These offerings prioritise data privacy, security, consent, and control.

“By digitising credit with privacy safeguards, the platform intends to expand the reach of formal credit, catering to a broader audience with lower incomes," the tech major said. 

During the 9th edition of Google for India, the company also announced its intention to start manufacturing its Pixel smartphones locally, starting with Pixel 8.

Besides, Google India announced other measures for small businesses in India. The tech giant said that with the help of AI, "Google Merchant Center Next will automatically populate a merchant's product feed with information detected from their website". 

The Google Merchant Center Next will allow merchants full control over what gets added to their feed.

It also launched ‘DigiKavach’ in India to protect people against financial frauds. 

Google Pay prevented scams worth Rs 12,000 crore on GPay and took steps to block 3,500 predatory loan apps.

Also, the company said it will soon help its billions of users in India to access critical information about over 100 government schemes.