GPay to offer gold-backed loans with Muthoot Finance

Google Pay will now offer gold-backed loans to its users, Google announced at the 10th Google for India event held on Thursday in New Delhi. This offering would be extended in partnership with Muthoot Finance with a focus on rural India. Additionally, Google Pay will partner with Aditya Birla Finance Capital to offer personal loans to users.

“Indians have a long cultural relationship with Gold that goes long beyond investment, which is why over 11% of the world's total gold is held by Indian households. This asset can be mobilised for economic activity and that is the idea for the loans,” Sharath Bulusu, Director, Product Management at Google says.

“This collaboration opens up an avenue to mobilise their latent gold assets, at affordable interest rates and with greater flexibility to chart a course for their (user) futures through education, business or anything else,” the release says.

“We’re adding Aditya Birla Finance Limited to the portfolio of credit providers on Google Pay, giving users a wider range of credit products to choose from, to meet their individual needs,” the official press release adds.

With Google’s focus now shifting towards credit accessibility in India, Google Pay has rolled out multilingual AI-powered support guides which will help in answering users’ questions about repayment cycles, eligibility criteria, EMIs, while providing relevant links.

“At every point, the agent provides the answer and the pointer to the detailed terms and conditions. A user is hand-held throughout the journey,” Sharath adds.

To empower users with the adequate information for responsible credit, Sharath shared that over 5 crore Google Pay users have checked their CIBIL score in the last one year of Google’s partnership with Credit Information Bureau (India) Limited (CIBIL).

Bulusu shares that the country in partnership with its loan providers has extended its loan products to over 13,500 pin codes across India of which 80% loans were disbursed to tier-2 cities. He further added that almost 90% of merchant payments end outside GPay.

Google recently partnered with NPCI to release its UPI Circle feature that will enable non-UPI holders to make online payments via the connected parent UPI account.

Last year in October, Google India had introduced sachet loans on the Google Pay app to support small businesses with loans starting from ₹15,000, with repayment options as low as ₹111, to assist merchants across the country. The company has partnered with key retail loan providers including HDFC Bank and Axis Bank among others.

During the keynote address, Roma Chobey, Google MD, shared that over 3.5 crore SME businesses are connected with almost a billion customers every month.