Fintech startup SlicePay acquires P2P lending platform Trustio

SlicePay, a fintech startup that provides buy-now-pay-later kind of service to its users, has acquired a peer-to-peer lending company Trustio. The deal is said to be an equity deal and as a part of the acquisition, the founders of Trustio will be joining the core team at SlicePay. Launched in 2016, Trustio is an invite-only platform for alumni of premier colleges to avail short-term credit from their fellow alumni. The company uses a proprietary credit scoring model that relies on education, professional experience, and number of backers from the community. The transaction will enhance its team strength, product capabilities and enrich its data science driven risk engine.

“Scaling a P2P 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,” said Pranay Bhardwaj, CEO and Co-founder, Trustio.

“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,” he added. Slicepay, on the other hand, is a micro-lending platform that works in a buy-now-pay-later format where students can purchase products on credit without any collateral. Students can avail services and products by paying monthly installments. Regarding the current acquisition, Deepak Malhotra, Co-founder, 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.” According to media sources, SlicePay provides credit line of up to Rs 60,000 to college students based in Bangalore and Chennai through their proprietary risk mechanism. The final loan disbursal is done by one of the two consumer lending NBFCs they work with.