Indian telecom giant Airtel acquires strategic equity stake in fintech startup

Bharti Airtel Limited, an Indian telecommunications services company, announced that it has acquired a stake in the fintech company Seynse Technologies.

The acquisition of the ‘strategic stake’ is made through its subsidiary Bharti Airtel Services. The fintech firm has built digital lending platform ‘Loan Singh’ that ease loans for credit-worthy and underserved borrowers.

“Over the years, Airtel has developed strong in-house data science capabilities that enable us to serve our customers better. Seynse’s advanced credit scoring algorithms based on multiple sources and digital analytics will add immense value to our innovation factory. We look forward to working with the passionate team of professionals at Seynse to bring targeted products and solutions to our 270 million plus customers,” Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO and Director – Engineering, Bharti Airtel, stated in the release.

Seynse has also created a proprietary credit engine and advanced machine learning capacity as a part of its fintech services, in order to serve customers. The companies did not disclose the amount invested or the equity stake taken.

According to industry experts, Airtel might leverage the technology platform by tying it with the payments bank business, Economictimes reported.

“We’re privileged to have Airtel as a partner in our growth journey and look forward to gaining from their deep understanding of the Indian customer. This partnership will give Seynse the opportunity to innovate for a much wider audience and add to its product portfolio,” Gourav Jaswal, Director of Seynse, stated.

Apart from Airtel, Seynse is also backed by individual investors including Gopal Srinivasan, Chairman of TVS Capital; Sanjay Nayar, CEO of KKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts), India; Paragon Partners’ founder Siddharth Parekh; among others.