E-commerce major Snapdeal has announced its foray into financial services with the acquisition of a majority stake in RupeePower, a leading digital financial products distribution platform. Snapdeal will now offer consumers a financial services marketplace – a first of its kind initiative in the e-commerce industry.

Through this marketplace, Snapdeal and RupeePower will endeavor to digitally organize the fragmented financial services market by integrating these services onto the Snapdeal platform.

RupeePower is a digital distribution platform for loans, credit cards and other personal finance products. With its credit comparison, matching and processing infrastructure and strong affiliation with banks and NBFCs, RupeePower will now join forces with Snapdeal in building a collaborative ecosystem to provide customers with a host of financial products.

The Softbank funded company has a nationwide reach, robust technology platform and deep consumer insights, and with RupeePower’s deep technical integrations in information systems of the financial services industry will create a powerful combination.

Commenting on this, Kunal Bahl, Co-founder & CEO, Snapdeal said, “Our aim is to create life changing experiences for our buyers and sellers and all our efforts at Snapdeal are in line with meeting this objective. Realizing the various difficulties that consumers face while deciding and purchasing financial products/services and the challenges that companies face while reaching out to the ‘right’ audience, we have brought RupeePower into our family to help solve the distribution challenges of the financial services ecosystem and make it more inclusive. The same way Snapdeal has democratised retail in India, we now aspire to democratise access to credit.”

Founded in 2011, RupeePower has enabled Rs. 1,500 crores of credit disbursal through its platform in the current financial. “The share of digital origination of credit is poised to grow from today’s 7.5% to 40% over the next four years in an INR 400,000 crore (USD 67bn) retail credit market growing at 20% annually.

“With this investment and by partnering with Snapdeal, we aim to become the #1 originator of financial products over the next couple of years. Our emphasis will be on scaling RupeePower into the top match-making platform between lenders and borrowers, providing consumers with the best targeted offers & a super-simplified loan process, while ensuring lower opex & smarter credit match for lenders,” said Tejasvi Mohanram, Founder & CEO, RupeePower.

The marketplace will include a wide range of financial services like personal loans, educational loans, credit cards (co-brand – B2B & B2C), auto loans, home loans and extended warranties amongst others.

With this launch, financial services companies will now be able to leverage Snapdeal’s nationwide reach across 5000+ towns and cities. Often resolving to follow up on cold leads, these companies will be able to market and target their products and services to a captive audience on Snapdeal implying higher conversion vis-à-vis the traditional offline channels.

According to some media reports, Snapdeal also acquired e-commerce management software and fulfillment solution provider Unicommerce, however, the company has not confirmed this as yet. Earlier this month, New Delhi-based company made an undisclosed amount of funding in logistics startup GoJavas.

Snapdeal which recently turned five has acquired five startups over the last five years. The company has acquired Grabbon.com, sports marketplace eSportsbuy, handicraft-focused marketplace Shopo.in, Doozton and Wishpicker.

This move from Snapdeal comes as a surprise following speculations of a possible acquisition of Mumbai-based Freecharge and Komli Media. Indian e-commerce is going through an interesting phase and e-commerce majors are exploring new avenues to turn profitable.