The Women Entrepreneurship Platform (WEP) and BHARATPE GROUP have joined to support female entrepreneurs across India on their paths to Independence and Business expansion. The alliance intends to create an ecosystem that unites female entrepreneurs from around the nation and provides them with the industry expertise, financial resources, and technical know-how they need to achieve their professional objectives.
Facilitating the creation of an aggregator platform that provides access to peer assistance, mentoring, networking opportunities, and a variety of learning resources will be the main focal area. This relationship was established as part of the BharatPe Group’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) program, “BharatPe Cares,” and it is consistent with the Group’s brand objective of empowering lives through inclusive fintech solutions. This particular project falls under the CSR program of PAYBACK, a BharatPe company.
According to the sixth economic census conducted by the Ministry of Statistics and Plan Implementation, women make up only 8.05 million, or 13.76 percent, of India’s 58.5 million overall entrepreneurs. According to the statistics, women entrepreneurs need to be given more power so they can pursue their aspirations.
Aiming to provide a level playing field where women have equal possibilities for advancement, the alliance intends to overcome the restrictive constraints that women entrepreneurs experience throughout India. Being a domestic fintech, the unicorn’s interaction with women solopreneurs and small company owners has allegedly helped it grasp the issues faced from their point of view, according to Nalin Negi, CFO and interim CEO of BharatPe, who spoke on this announcement. The biggest factor is the absence of access to financial know-how, networking channels, mentorship, and fundraising opportunities.
According to a report from the industry, 150–170 million new employment for working-age people in India can be created by women entrepreneurs by 2030, which is more than 25% of the total. Hence, encouraging women’s entrepreneurship would increase the economy by creating jobs and is essential to growing India’s economy to US$ 5 trillion one. Through our collaboration with WEP, we hope to accelerate the creation of a plug-and-play digital infrastructure that will close current gaps and promote the development of women entrepreneurs.
According to WEP mission director Anna Roy, despite the fact that India’s entrepreneurial environment is booming, women-led firms still require significant support in order to scale their operations, and this is especially true because of social biases. Women business owners across the nation are unfairly at a disadvantage since they aren’t given access to networking and mentoring opportunities.
“WEP is a public-private program that seeks to offer a continuum of assistance to female entrepreneurs by utilizing the network of different ecosystem stakeholders. By providing women with the appropriate information at the appropriate moment, the goal is to eliminate information asymmetry, connect these smoothly across the board, and empower women, she added.
The first 0% MDR payment acceptance service in India and the first UPI interoperable QR code were both introduced by BharatPe in 2018. Besides Covid, it also debuted a card acceptance terminal called BharatSwipe in 2020. Now, it processes over 30 million UPI transactions each month for 1 crore merchants across 400 cities, with a yearly Transaction Processing Value of over $ 24 billion in payments.
The company has already made it possible for loans totaling Rs 8000 crores to be disbursed. The POS division of BharatPe uses its equipment to process about $3.5 billion in payments each year. Investors including Tiger Global, Dragoneer Investment Group, Steadfast Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Steadview Capital, Beenext, Amplo, and Sequoia Capital have contributed around $583 million in stock to the company so far.
