Pine Labs has teamed up with ZestMoney, a leading consumer lending Fintech firm based in India. Through the partnership, the companies will offer in-store digital equated monthly installment (EMI) options to “new-to-credit” customers via Pine Labs’ Plutus and Plutus Smart point of sale (PoS) devices.
ZestMoney EMI on Pine Labs devices will be available at over 20,000 outlets across 100 cities in India (within the next year).
Venkat Paruchuri, chief product officer at Pine Labs, noted:
“Our initial focus will be on mobile, consumer durables and IT categories. We hope to extend the instant credit facility to other categories such as apparels and fashion, education, wellness and healthcare, and travel and tourism over time.”
Paruchuri added:
“At Pine Labs, we have built an ecosystem of affordability solutions for customers. We have partnerships with 21 issuers that offer EMI on debit and credit cards across a network of 93,000 merchants and already serve millions of customers every quarter. Our partnership with ZestMoney will help Pine Labs reach out to a whole new group of customers.”
Pine Labs and ZestMoney are currently working with various local manufacturers who deal with mobile, consumer durables and laptops, in order to bring EMIs with 3, 6, 9, and 12 months tenure.
Lizzie Chapman, co-founder and CEO at ZestMoney, remarked:
“We are excited about offering EMI on POS machines, Pine Labs’ continued offline presence and experience in exceeding merchant and consumer expectations for over 20 years translates to intimate knowledge on how to manoeuvre in this space.”
Chapman added:
“This makes them the perfect partner with whom ZestMoney can further expand offline as there is perfect alignment in both companies’ respective objectives for their users.”
The partnership between ZestMoney and Pine Labs will allow first-time credit seekers, who may not have credit or debit cards, to buy items at physical store locations and take advantage of EMI options.
Pine Labs’ cloud-powered software facilitates instant credit disbursal using credit risk and disbursement tools offered by ZestMoney.