Google-incubated fintech startup Financepeer, which provides interest-free tuition fees to parents of school and college-going students, is planning to double the numbers of schools/colleges it taps to 9,000 by December and also grow its loan book two-fold to Rs 1,000 crore.

During the first seven months of the pandemic, the company has added over 1 million users/parents as they were without income or faced pay-cuts, in 4,500 institutions, over 3,000 are schools and coaching centers and a good number of them came on board during the first seven months of the lockdown. Some of the top school chains which it serves include the Delhi Public School, GEMS Education, Birla Open Minds and Orchids etc. 

Mr. Sunit Gajbhiye, Co-Founder and CBO Financepeer Said, we started our operations in 2017 and till now we have provided loans to 1.5 million students. We are currently serving around 4,500 schools/colleges, universities and coaching centers making us the largest in this segment. We plan to double the number of schools/institutions to 9,000 by the end of the year and expect to double the loan book to RS 1000 crore by the end of the year.

While for the parents, the loan comes at zero additional cost, Financepeer collects an upfront 5 per cent in commission/fee from the school, which gets the whole fee paid in the beginning of the academic year. Parents can pay back in five-nine EMIs with no interest; the number of EMIs is fixed by the school.

Parents also get rewarded by group health insurance covering accidents, cash-back offers through vouchers and online courses payments, among other benefits, which has ensured that more than 95 percent of parents stay back with it. So far this academic year, as many as 30,000 parents availed of the insurance facility. On the asset quality, he said, NPA is a negligible 0.07 per cent this current academic year as only around 15 parents have defaulted. Margins vary from 1.5-3 per cent and the average loan is Rs 75,000-80,000 per student. 

Financepeer has also raised USD 4 million in external funding, has six other offices in Pune, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Dehradun, and employs 180 people.