SlicePay Acquires Trustio, A P2P Lending Platform for College Students

SlicePay, a Buy Now Pay Later fintech startup which enables college students to avail everyday products and services at flexible monthly payments has acquired Trustio, a New Delhi based P2P lending company giving alumni-backed loans to students and recent graduates, which was backed by Axilor Ventures and Zostel CEO Dharamveer Singh Chouhan. This is an all equity deal and the founders of Trustio will be joining the core team at SlicePay. This is SlicePay’s first acquisition in the market, done to enhance its team strength, product capabilities and enrich its data science driven risk engine with a broader aim to build an infrastructure that can support the rapid 18% WoW growth it is seeing since the last 2 quarters.

SlicePay provides credit line upto Rs 60,000 to college students based in Bangalore and Chennai through their proprietary risk mechanism, and then the final loan disbursal is done by one of the two consumer lending NBFCs they work with. They have also recently tied up with a systemically important large NBFC which has ~2500 cr loan book, and are in the final stages of discussions with a publically traded NBFC that has ~10,000 cr book. Rajan Bajaj, cofounder at Slicepay said: “We have been getting many inbounds from NBFCs over the last few months as we have established that there is a huge market of new to credit customers, that can be served economically. We have seen multiple cycles of credit disbursal and have been consistently maintaining NPAs under 0.8% which is very encouraging for a debt investor.”

Pranay Bhardwaj, CEO and cofounder of Trustio, said: “Scaling a peer 2 peer lending model was incredibly tough and I was looking out for synergies with other people in this space who had a better solution to the student credit problem we were trying to solve. I got in touch with almost all the fintech companies in this space, and was impressed with the product market fit that SlicePay has found. We finally decided to join the SlicePay team as we had very similar philosophy focused on cost effective distribution & data driven risk management that is a must have for this business.”

Regarding the current acquisition, Deepak Malhotra, co-founder at SlicePay said “Trustio was building the SoFi of India, and we liked the experience Pranay had gained with Trustio. This investment would help us in improving our core product capabilities even further and constantly keep innovating with new credit products in a rapidly growing market.”