Bengaluru: Two senior executives have resigned from BharatPe, the fintech firm that has been embroiled in controversy since the beginning of the year.
People in the know said that Nishit Sharma, chief revenue officer, and Chandrima Dhar, head of institutional debt, both left the company in recent weeks for personal reasons.
“It is unclear whether the company will seek to replace these individuals or consolidate some of their functions under the incoming chief financial officer,” one of the sources said.
Dhar joined the company in September 2020, replacing Sharma, who has been with the company since July 2019. During his tenure, Sharma was in charge of the revenue strategy for the company’s lending and point-of-sale division, BharatPe Swipe.
Dhar was in charge of managing debt procurement as well as relationships with its venture debt, non-banking finance, and development finance partners.
BharatPe has been looking for a CFO and stated in May that it would have a candidate by the end of the current quarter. Meanwhile, an executive from the professional services firm Alvarez & Marsal has been appointed as interim CFO.
In recent months, the company has undergone several rounds of audits and has been focusing on introducing new measures to its governance practices.
It has been the subject of intense investor and media scrutiny since cofounder Ashneer Grover sued Kotak Mahindra Bank NSE -0.51 percent managing director Uday Kotak in January, alleging that the lender refused him financing for a personal investment in Nykaa’s IPO last November.
After receiving complaints from an internal whistleblower about alleged financial malpractices and corporate misgovernance at the firm, BharatPe’s board hired independent auditors A&M and PricewaterhouseCoopers at the end of January. As a result, the company’s head of controls, Madhuri Jain, who is also Grover’s wife, was fired. Grover resigned from the company and its board of directors in March.
Last month, the company announced that it had served notices on several of its merchants who, it claimed, were involved in incorrect or inflated invoices and that it had implemented a new vendor procurement policy. It also fired several employees who had direct contact with the blocked vendors.
BharatPe chairman Rajnish Kumar told ET on April 1 that the company was planning to go public within the next 18-24 months.
Last October, a consortium led by BharatPe’s parent company, Resilient Innovations, and Centrum Financial Services received approval to acquire the business of Punjab & Maharashtra Cooperative Bank and assist in its resolution.
In addition, Unity Small Finance Bank, a joint venture between BharatPe and Centrum, was granted permission to establish a small finance bank.
According to the people mentioned earlier, the small finance bank’s current focus is to assist PMC Bank’s stuck depositors with their deposits.
Simultaneously, BharatPe is assisting the small finance bank in developing its backend tech infrastructure in order to connect with its own platform as well as other loan origination channels, they added.
According to BharatPe, it currently serves over 8 million merchants in over 150 cities and processes annualized payments worth more than $16 billion. It has also installed over 125,000 POS devices in merchants.
Tiger Global, Steadfast Capital, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, Ribbit Capital, and Beenext are among the investors in the company, which has raised over $650 million in equity and debt to date. In August 2021, it was valued at $2.85 billion.
