Bengaluru: BharatPe, the fintech company that has been mired in scandal since the beginning of the year, has lost two senior executives.
Nishit Sharma, the company’s chief revenue officer, and Chandrima Dhar, the company’s head of institutional debt, both resigned recently for personal reasons.
“It’s unclear if the corporation will seek to replace these workers or consolidate some of their tasks under the incoming chief financial officer,” one of the sources said.
Dhar joined the organization in September 2020, while Sharma has been with it since July 2019. Sharma was in charge of the revenue strategy for BharatPe Swipe, the company’s lending and point-of-sale segment, during his time there.
Dhar was in charge of loan procurement as well as managing connections with venture debt, non-banking finance, and development finance partners.
BharatPe has been looking for a CFO and announced in May that it would hire someone at the end of the current quarter. In the meanwhile, an executive from the professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal has been appointed as interim CFO.
In recent months, the corporation has completed many rounds of audits and has been focusing on implementing new governance standards.
After cofounder Ashneer Grover sued Kotak Mahindra Bank NSE 0.86 percent managing director Uday Kotak in January, alleging that the lender refused him money for a personal investment in Nykaa’s IPO,,, last November, the company has been the subject of intense investor and media attention.
After receiving charges from an internal whistle-blower about alleged financial malpractices and corporate misgovernance at BharatPe, the board recruited independent auditors A&M and PricewaterhouseCoopers at the end of January. Madhuri Jain, the company’s head of controls and Grover’s wife, was fired as a result of this. Grover resigned from the corporation and its board of directors in March.
Last month, the company announced that it had sent letters to several of its merchants for allegedly submitting erroneous or inflated bills and that it had implemented a new vendor procurement strategy. It also fired a number of employees who had direct contact with the blacklisted vendors.
BharatPe chairman Rajnish Kumar told the Press on April 1 that the company was planning to go public in the following 18-24 months.
In October of last year, a group led by BharatPe’s parent company, Resilient Innovations, and Centrum Financial Services, received authorization to buy the Punjab & Maharashtra Cooperative Bank’s business and help it resolve.
Unity Small Finance Bank, a small finance bank was also granted to BharatPe and Centrum, a joint venture between BharatPe and BharatPe.
According to the sources mentioned previously, the small finance bank’s current priority is to assist PMC Bank’s trapped depositors with their savings.
BharatPe is also assisting the small finance bank in developing its digital backend infrastructure so that it can link with its own platform as well as other loan origination channels, they said.
BharatPe claims to be supporting more than 8 million merchants in more than 150 locations and processing over $16 billion in annualized payments. Over 125,000 point-of-sale devices have been installed among merchants.
Tiger Global, Steadfast Capital, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, and Beenext are among the investors in the company, which has raised approximately $650 million in stock and debt so far. In August 2021, it was valued at $2.85 billion.
